Rick's Café Américain

Humbug

2011-12-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

So instead of working all day on Solitaire Till Dawn, today I took some time in the afternoon and played a game with the family.

I know. I'm sorry. I should have been working. It's just that I'm getting really tired of those same three ghosts showing up, every Christmas Eve, year after year, and yelling at me about the whole work ethic thing.

It's not just that they're strident. ("Listen unto me! Comest thou with me! Lookest thou over there!" Hoo, boy.) But in recent years they've been getting more than a little bit whiney, if you want the truth. Not to mention the increasingly obvious air of desperation.

So this year I thought I'd throw them a bone, see if maybe they'll cut me some slack. It would be nice to get some sleep on Christmas Eve, for once.

You might want to do likewise: go play something that's for more than one player. Some day those guys are just going to flat give up on me as a bad job, and then they might be after you next. I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, I've gotta get back to work now. Happy holidays to you and yours!

That's the Sound of the Men...

2011-12-03T23:17:00.001-08:00

I see it's been a while since I've posted anything other than the little updates in the box to the right. That's because I generally save these larger posts for larger subjects or events, and lately there's been nothing of that nature to share. But I also know that Solitaire Till Dawn's amazing legion of fans can get antsy if they don't hear something new once in a while about the progress of the project, and I don't want to leave everyone hanging. This is just a little update post to reassure you all that I haven't forgotten about you.

And the news is just this: It's not done yet. I don't know when it will be done. But I am still working on it, as hard as I can given my other responsibilities.

The work I've been doing doesn't lend itself to quick descriptions for the non-programming public, and if I took the time to try to explain, it would be time taken from actually working on the upgrade. I hope you'll accept instead my assurance that I've made some good strides forward lately. I completed a major architecture change recently that brought a great improvement in the program's behavior, and I tracked down and slew a couple of nasty but well-hidden bugs just the other day.

I know it's been a long wait, and no one (certainly not me!) will be happy as the wait grows longer. But I appreciate your patience, and I'll keep at it.

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

2011-10-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs is gone.

I never met Mr. Jobs. Although I worked for Apple (and its spin-off, Taligent) for over ten years, I was there during John Sculley's reign and later, Gil Amelio's. Jobs hired Sculley away from Pepsi after taking him for a walk in the Stanford hills, and asking him a now-legendary question: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

But it was always Steve Jobs who changed the world. Like many others, I learned of his death today using a device that would not have existed without him. A few months back I went on a road trip with one of my sons, to visit and tour my alma mater UCLA. I took my iPhone, and on that three-day trip it served as a map, a navigator, a traffic reporter, the yellow pages, a restaurant critic, a tour guide, an email client, an encyclopedia, a newspaper, a camera, a publisher, a UCLA course catalog... oh yeah, and a phone. There would be smart phones today without Steve Jobs, but there wouldn't be iPhones: the one that all the others are trying to imitate and improve upon.

I've been an Apple fan since about 1986: my first computer was a Mac Plus, at the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend. I have not been without a Mac computer since then: 25 years now. I should own one of those T-shirts that say "I was an Apple fan when Apple was doomed." (I don't, only because I don't wear T-shirts: they don't have a pocket for my glasses.) Followers of this blog know that I have been selling Solitaire Till Dawn for Macintosh computers for over 20 of those years. The smooth Mac interface with its marvelous attention to detail was the inspiration for the attention to detail I've tried to put into Solitaire Till Dawn, and the continuing popularity of the Mac (even through the darker years) kept it selling, and helped my family get along with only one parent working, freeing Helen to stay home and raise the kids.

One of the downsides to aging, I've found, is the number of times I find myself mourning somebody I never met, somebody who made the world a better place. I remember hearing of the deaths of Louis Armstrong, Walt Kelly, Jim Henson, Isaac Asimov, and many other great creators; and now, Steve Jobs.

Thank you, Steve. I wish you could have stayed longer.

A Little UI Work

2011-09-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

I see it's been over a month since my last post, so I thought I'd put something out to show that I haven't been idle. I've been doing user interface (UI) programming, and I have something new to show.

Solitaire Till Dawn offers 100 different kinds of solitaire. That makes a bit of a problem: how to present 100 different games to users in a way that makes it easy to find the games they know, yet also easy to find new games they might like. In the pre-Lion version, your "Favorites" are listed in a popup menu in the toolbar, and you only have to select one to start a game. To see all 100 games, you would select "Choose from All Games..." from the same menu, and that would open the Game Chooser window, which was a rather complicated affair.

The left edge of the window

I've learned that a lot of users didn't realize that "Choose from All Games..." was an option rather than just a label, and I'd get emails asking me where all the other games were hiding. So in this new version, I'm trying to make that more obvious. Here's a screen shot showing part of the left edge of the game window.

There on the edge, you can see three tabs labeled "My Favorites", "All Games", and "Goodies". These tabs are always visible, but usually take up just that small amount of space on the side. It should be obvious (I hope!) that you can click them to get something interesting to happen.

If you click any of the buttons, a "drawer" will slide out from the left edge. The next image shows what you might see after clicking the "My Favorites" button.

The drawer is open

You can see a list of 16 games, which are the ones selected as your favorites out of the full list of 100 games. This is what you'd use to select a game you already know you like.

You can select a game by clicking with the mouse, or by typing the first few letters of its name. If you double-click your selection, or press Enter or Return, a game of your selected kind will start immediately.

The All Games list, with a game selected

Now here's what you get if you click the "All Games" tab: the full list of games, scrollable of course. You can select games and start playing in exactly the same way as in the "Favorites" list.

In this image, you can see that "Baker's Game" has been selected, and this reveals another new feature: the small green i-in-a-circle that appears by the selected game. In the image below, you can see the Game Info panel that appears when you click the green i.

The Game Info panel

The Game Info panel shows full information about the selected game, everything but the actual rules; and you can see the rules by clicking the "Show Rules" button near the top-center.

If you change your selected game, the Game Info window will move to match your selection, and show you info about the newly-selected game.

Finally, you can dismiss the Game Info window by clicking the small x in the upper-left corner (I'll probably change that to actually say "Close this window"). The whole business including the drawer will disappear back into the left edge if you click the highlighted tab, or click anywhere outside the panel and the drawer.

This isn't final

I'm sure there'll be changes before this ships. For one, there's nothing in the "Goodies" tab yet, and I'm not sure what might go there; it might vanish altogether.

Here's a change I'm thinking about right now: I may get rid of the little green i and instead just have the Game Info panel appear whenever you select a game. That's because I'm worried that some people won't realize the green i can be clicked, and they will miss ever seeing the Game Info window. On the other hand, if you know what game you want, you won't need to see that panel, and it would be annoying to have it flash into existence and then instantly disappearing as your new game starts. Perhaps it should appear only after a brief delay?

I'm not sure yet. What do you think?

Solitaire Till Dawn Update

2011-08-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

I get mail—lots of mail—asking me about Solitaire Till Dawn and Lion. Some people seem to be worried that I don't know that the current release won't run under Lion.

Really, I know. Really. I know!! And I continue to work on a Lion version, when and as I can.

There are kind of two parts to getting it done. The first and hardest part is rewriting what I call the "solitaire engine" and updating the screen-drawing and animation code. This is rocket science, of a sort. The engine is complex (which is why Solitaire Till Dawn can present so many and such varied games), while animation is an exercise in concurrent programming. If you don't know what that is, never mind: just trust me that it's hard to get it right.

Today I hit a milestone: the engine and the animation are now working correctly. That's not to say that there isn't more work to do on them; but the really important fundamental stuff is done. (I will now pause, so that those of you who are so inclined may cheer.)

This means that I can now begin working on application stuff: buttons, controls, prefs window, saving and resuming games, and all the bells and whistles to be found in the menus and toolbar. This stuff is generally easier to do, but there's a lot of it to get through. I will be leaving some of the old features out of the first release, just so I can release a little sooner and get you something that will run under Lion and get you your solitaire fix. Any missing features will likely be added back in later, in updates.

There is still a lot to do, and I still don't know when it will be done. But take heart: I am working on it, I am making progress!

(And yes... I know the current version doesn't run under Lion!)

Continental Rottweiler at Kublacon 2011

2011-06-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

Helen and I were at Kublacon this Memorial Day weekend, as we have been every year for the past several. It wasn't as good a trip for me this year; I was too tired and sleep-deprived before the con even started. But there were a few high points anyway.

Continental Railways of the World
The highest point for me was certainly the four-and-a-half-hour, five-player Continental Railways of the World session that I hosted on Sunday morning. This playtest was very successful in several ways. First off, everybody seemed to have a good time! The game didn't bog down, and was competitive for its entire duration.

The Income Trough
I've been worried about a phenomenon we've been calling the "income trough". As RotW players will know, your income in the game is tied to your score. For most of a normal, one-board game, income rises as your score rises; but then income first tops out, then actually declines as your score continues to rise. In normal games this isn't much of an issue because by the time it happens, you've usually built most of the track you intend to build, and you don't need much money any more. But in the Continental game, you can find your net income dropping to near, or even below, zero just when the West opens up and you suddenly need to build a lot of track as everyone races west! A player who "bottoms out" at this moment can be seriously handicapped, and as a result will have no fun for the next two hours while he sits hopelessly in last place, cash-strapped and in debt, waiting for the game to end.

It would be easy to shrug this off and say "well, Player Red, you should have planned ahead." But I'd rather find a solution that allows such a player to take a less fatal hit, while still rewarding the players that did plan their income curve more successfully. I've had a couple of mechanisms in place for this, but they needed tuning. In this session, I think we finally had it tuned about right. Every player has a financial choice to make at the moment the West opens up; in the past, that "choice" has been a no-brainer. In this session, every player had to think it over, and they didn't all choose the same way. Furthermore, I was the player who was mired in the income trough, and sure enough I didn't win; but I was at least able to survive and progress. I think it worked out pretty well.

Paths to Victory
The winning player built a nearly coast-to-coast network, and one of the largest on the board. This was gratifying to me, simply because I love to see that kind of layout. But the same player won an earlier session by staying close to the Eastern board, with only a small extension across to the Western board. I'm pleased to see that there's no single approach to winning the Continental game.

Rail Baron Cards
Another measure of success for playtests is whether you learned anything new. I think I did. I was a bit shocked at the huge effect that the Rail Baron cards had for the more successful players. They were real game-changers.

I had "scaled up" the bonuses that these cards grant. In a normal game, they're worth (very roughly) 10% of your final score. Because final scores in the Continental game tend to be at least double a typical normal score, I made the Continental Baron bonuses much larger to match. But having seen them in action, I'm inclined to think that this was a mistake. Although the final scores were much larger than in a normal game, the differences between the winning player's score and his nearest competitors were not so much larger. The Baron Cards were overwhelming those differences, more than I think they should.

I plan to sit down soon and re-think those bonuses. I will likely tone them down to something in between their current values and those in a normal game. In addition, I'm tempted to look into making them incremental: instead of getting a single big all-or-nothing bonus, you'd be able to claim a partial bonus for achieving a portion of the goal. This sort of bonus already exists, for example in the Eastern U.S. Rail Baron card that awards 2 points for every connection you own into Chicago. Your bonus from that card can be 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 points. I may not be able to come up with a full set of such incremental bonuses, but I'll see what I can do.

The Cannonball Express: Now with more Express!

2011-05-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

Correction: In writing this post, I used my own article (quoted below) as source material. Re-reading this post a few weeks later, I realized that I'd made a historical error in that article, and perpetuated it in this post. I programmed the Cray in 1989, ten years before writing the article, and not twenty years earlier in 1979. I've corrected the post.

Twelve years ago, in 1999, I wrote an article for TidBITS called Power Macintosh G3: The Cannonball Express. It was a discussion of speed in computers, and how software and hardware factors contributed to the simple-sounding notion of "speed". Part of it was a (highly unscientific!) comparison between the speed of the new-in-1999 Power Macintosh G3, and a Cray Y-MP supercomputer that I'd had a chance to program some ten years earlier, circa 1989.

You can read the article if you like—it's not too long, and it's written for the non-technical reader (and the puzzle is fun, too). Or you can get a quick summary by reading the next couple of paragraphs here:

The highly unscientific comparison was a puzzle-solving problem I'd written, called "Piper". The article discussed the evolution of Piper and the techniques I'd applied to try to make it run faster. There was a particular puzzle called "woodchuck" that I wanted to solve, because for years it had proven to be too big a problem for Piper to handle in any reasonable time period. The Cray, a $15,000,000 room-filling monster that was one of the fastest computers in the world at the time, finally solved it in a 20-hour run.

Ten years later, I tried running Piper again on the latest-and-greatest Macintosh tower, and it blew away the Cray by solving "woodchuck" in under two minutes!

Twelve years after that—that is, a few days ago—I remembered the article. Piper's source code was made available with the article. After a brief search occasioned by a stale download link, I found the source, downloaded it, tweaked it a bit for a modern compiler, and ran it on my 2.8 GHz, dual processor Quad-Core Intel Xeon Macintosh tower. The results: on this hardware, Piper solved "woodchuck" in 14 seconds flat, taking 9 seconds to find the best solution and then running another 5 seconds to ensure that no better solution exists.

Nine seconds. Wow.

A word about Solitaire Till Dawn
I continue to get comments and mail, urging me to work hard on a Lion-compatible version of Solitaire Till Dawn. I assure you all, I am working hard, and making good progress. You can keep an eye on that progress by visiting this blog and checking the SOLITAIRE TILL DAWN update box in the upper-right corner of the page. I post updates there two or three times a week, usually. And as always, thanks for your support, your interest, and your patience while I get this done!

Unplanned Obsolescence

2011-04-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

My software product Solitaire Till Dawn (STD) has had a long history. It is now 20 years old! During that two-decade history, I have had two processors (the Motorola 68000 and the PowerPC), one development environment (Metrowerks CodeWarrior) and one operating system (classic Mac OS, versions 7.0 through 9.whatever), all shot out from under me.

The First Dead Horse
When Apple switched from the Motorola family of CPUs to the PowerPC family, I didn't have to do anything: Apple was conscientious about backward compatibility, and STD ran nicely under emulation. Most users never knew the difference. I did get a lot of concerned mail from users who did know the difference and wanted a nice "efficient" native version, but the truth was that there was no need. STD did not run slowly, and did not use enough CPU even under emulation to noticeably affect the rest of the system. A couple of years after the switch, everybody forgot about the issue and I stopped getting mail about it.

The Second Dead Horse
Then Apple switched operating systems, from the classic Mac OS to the shiny new OS X. This time, it mattered. Technically you could still run STD unmodified, even though it was compiled for a different CPU and written for a different OS (Apple works very hard at backward compatibility). But in this case, it did run slowly and perform poorly, and it would also crash easily (something it never did under classic Mac OS, I hasten to add). It also looked very old-fashioned. I had to re-write STD for OS X and PowerPC. And, as previously chronicled, I made a mistake. I used the Carbon API instead of going all the way to the fully-modern Cocoa, and I stuck with the good old reliable CodeWarrior development system instead of using Apple's new Xcode.

The Third Dead Horse
Then Metrowerks decided to stop supporting CodeWarrior for the Mac. CodeWarrior still ran, and for a while I was able to continue making changes and updates to STD (now STDX). But as OS X evolved, good old CodeWarrior did not keep up, and over time became more and more "old" and less and less "good".

The Fourth Dead Horse
After that, a new blow: Apple switched processors again, abandoning the PowerPC in favor of the Intel line of CPUs. CodeWarrior could not compile Mac code to Intel-native executable. I was now unable to produce a native version of STDX. (Apple claims that Xcode can import a CodeWarrior project and take it over. I tried this, more than once. I never got it to work.)

But although it was now venerable in "computer years" (kind of like "dog years", they go by fast), the latest version of STDX still worked just fine. When OS X 10.6 came out, the PowerPC compatibility layer (called "Rosetta") was no longer installed by default, but Apple made it easy to install if you needed it, so most STDX users were still good to go.

The Fifth Dead Horse, and a Live Lion
But now OS X 10.7 "Lion" is on the horizon. And although it's not released yet and there's time for changes, it seems almost certain that Lion will not support Rosetta at all. If so, the current-yet-antique STDX simply won't run on Lion. For the first time in 20 years, an up-to-date Mac user won't be able to play Solitaire Till Dawn.

My only recourse now is to rewrite STDX using Xcode. I actually started this project quite a while ago, but it goes slowly: it's a big project (you'd be surprised), and I haven't the spare time (and energy) I used to have. I've learned a lesson about clinging to old standards, so this time I'm trying to make the code base as modern as I can; but that also adds time to the project.

My current goal is to create a (not-so)-quick-and-dirty STDX, fully modern and Intel-native, but not containing all the myriad whistles and bells of the previous versions. That will help me get it out the door faster, the sooner to relieve the withdrawal symptoms of STDX fans on Lion. Then over time I'll add old features back in, along with new ones perhaps, until it is once again at its full glory. (All this for the desktop, with iPad and perhaps iPhone/iPod versions to follow if all goes well.)

I really am working on this, and so is Helen, who has a parallel project taking a different approach. But it really is going slowly. The chances that we'll be ready when Lion is ready are just about nil, so there will be a gap of time. But watch this space, and keep an eye on http://www.semicolon.com for news. It will happen someday, if I can make it happen. In the meantime, your patience and understanding is appreciated.

The Jaded Gamer

2011-03-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

We've been through a number of phases in our career as boardgame hobbyists. It's been an interesting journey. (Well, it's been interesting to us. If you have no love for the love of boardgames, you'd best stop reading now. What follows is the height of geekery.)

When we first discovered modern boardgames, we were delighted but a bit reluctant to start a collection. I remember trying Reiner Knizia's Samurai and really liking it, but we were put off by the $38 price tag it carried. Back then, that felt like a lot of money for "just a boardgame."

Within a year, our attitude had changed. We'd been to a few specialty game stores, we'd discovered BoardGameGeek, and most importantly, we'd played a bunch of games. We realized that a game that costs less than taking the family to a movie, and which can entertain the whole family not just once but over and over again, is actually a pretty good use of our entertainment budget. We started buying games.

At first it was easy. There were lots of great games, and BoardGameGeek and a growing circle of gamer friends clued us in to the good ones. We liked nearly every game we bought, so we kept buying.

But after a while we noticed that we didn't like all of the games we bought, even some of the most highly-rated ones. We realized that there were quite a few different kinds of boardgames, and we liked some kinds better than others. We now know that we mostly don't like party games, wargames, dexterity games, or games with a high luck factor. We do like strategy games (where the strategy is something other or more than maneuvering military units on a map), "economic" games (where you start with a few resources and a little money, and build a big economic empire or engine of some kind), and low-luck card games.

That understanding helped us refine our purchasing habits, and we once again found that we liked nearly every game we bought.

After a few of years of this, we found that we had become collectors. We had so many games that years went by without some of them getting played. This may sound foolish, but in fact it works for us. The reason is that not every game, even the really good ones, are good choices for every occasion. Selecting the right game to play depends on many factors: how many players we have, how willing they are to learn a new game, how long and complex the rules are, how long the game will take to play. Like us, our gaming partners have their own preferences as to what kinds of game they like, and those preferences aren't a perfect overlap with ours. And then there's mood: sometimes we're up for a highly competitive skull-cracker, while other times we want to take it easy. This is the chief reason for having a large collection of games: the desire to have the right game for every occasion.

And now more years have passed, and I think I've reached a new phase (although in this I won't speak for the rest of the family). I've realized that there are some dusty games in our collection that delighted us when we first got them, but that we haven't played for years, and which I haven't missed. They're perfectly good games, but we now have other, better games that fill the same niche in our collection. Why play a lesser game when I can play a better one that scratches the same itch? Simple variety is worth something, but the collection is large enough now that that really isn't a problem.

If it were just me, I think I'd be making a list of games to purge. We have already done some purging, but so far it's been games we don't like. We're not quite ready to take the step of getting rid of games we actually like-but-not-enough. But I'm getting there!

(Getting rid of games is almost a hobby of its own, by the way. We usually trade with other gamers for games we hope to like better, but we have also sold them off at flea markets. eBay is another option. Other gamers somewhere will want and enjoy our cast-offs!)

But in case you're wondering, let me be clear on one point: I'm not done with adding games to our collection. Perish the thought! We are still adding to our collection: new games keep coming out, and we continue to want to acquire the best of them. But I'm now starting to think in terms of improving the collection instead of merely expanding it.

Screaming Video

2011-01-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

In many ways, we're a family on the cutting edge of new technology. In other ways, we're a bit behind the times. We recently and belatedly realized that instead of paying big bucks to our satellite TV provider for a lot of high-end channels we mostly don't watch, we could instead pay $7.99 to Netflix and watch any of bazillions of TV shows and movies, any time we like, on demand. To do this, we needed a new piece of hardware: a "streaming video" box hooked up to our Internet connection and to our TV set. The hardware costs in the neighborhood of $100, depending on what you get; although some brands are more expensive, you can get a very nice unit for that price from a number of vendors.

That sounded like a good deal to us, so all we had to do was decide which brand. I chatted at length with a good friend who had experience with a couple of different models, and we did our research on the Web, looking at specs and reviews. Based on on research and word-of-mouth, it came down to two choices: Apple TV, and Roku.

In most respects there's little to distinguish these products. Our friend told us that both were good and we'd be happy with either, but in his opinion the Apple product had (as you might expect!) a nicer user interface. Both he and a reviewer also thought that Apple provided better picture quality. Pretty much everybody agrees that Roku offers a lot more content than Apple TV, but all we really care about is Netflix, and that's available through both boxes.

We've been an Apple household for over twenty years. Nothing as complex as a computer (or anything with a computer in it) is ever 100% perfect, and we've had some complaints over the years; but in general, Apple has consistently provided great products and we've been very happy with them. That made the decision seem clear: we went down to the Apple store and bought an AppleTV.

If you haven't seen one of these things, they're absurdly small: a little larger (and squarer) than a hockey puck. You plug them into the wall for power, into your household network (wired or wireless) for Internet access, and into your TV set. Power it up, work through a couple of minutes of easy setup, and hey presto! TV on demand... it says here.

And suddenly, we found ourselves in the wide, wide, world of dreadful disappointment. We selected a show, the "I'm busy" spinner appeared, and we had to wait for a few minutes, about enough time to go make microwave popcorn. Then the show started, played for fifteen seconds, then froze. It continued this alternating stop-and-go for the first several minutes of the show. After that, it seemed to settle down, and provided smooth playback and very good picture quality. We were disappointed, but it seemed like something we could live with.

We tried another show. The spinner appeared... and never went away! The show never started. After twenty minutes of increasing disbelief, we reset the machine and tried again. While some shows seemed to play without problems (other than a bit of startup stuttering), most shows would never start. We'd just get that spinner, for as long as our patience held out.

People, it is not "video on demand" if it takes half an hour or more for the show to start!

We got on the Internet again, using search keywords like "slow loading." We quickly found out what none of the reviews had told us: a small but significant number of Apple TV users have been reporting this behavior. It apparently started about three months ago, with Apple's latest software update for the product. To date, Apple has neither acknowledged the problem nor provided a fix.

In over twenty years, this is the first time we've ever had to regard an Apple product as a complete and utter failure. That thing is a $100 doorstop.

Our internet connection is 1.5MB DSL. We are aware that 3.0MB is the recommended minimum for streaming TV. We've signed up for that, and the upgrade should kick in sometime next week. We will keep the Apple TV box until then, and see if the network upgrade helps. If it doesn't we'll return it, with some choice words for the salesman who sold it to us without saying a word about these problems.

Last night, we went out and bought a Roku XD|S at Fry's, for exactly the same price as the Apple box. We brought it home, plugged it in, set it up, and it pretty much worked immediately. The user interface and setup procedures are a bit more cumbersome than Apple's (and the screen display and menus are definitely uglier), but the Roku is not at all difficult to use. We had one setup glitch: you have to tell the Roku to install the Netflix application, which it does by downloading from the network. (Apple TV comes with Netflix pre-installed.) Just like the Apple box, this download showed us its version of "please wait" and stayed that way for twenty minutes until we ran out of patience. We restarted the box, and found that Netflix was now installed and working. We had no further problems: every show we tried started within seconds, played smoothly, and showed good picture quality. (We expect the picture quality to improve once our network upgrade is complete.)

Unless the network upgrade somehow fixes Apple's problem and the Apple TV really does show significantly better picture quality than the Roku, we'll be returning the Apple box and keeping the Roku.

In Stores Now

2010-12-19T20:51:00.000-08:00

I think most of the regular readers of this blog already know the following from Facebook and Twitter posts and the like, but since I've chronicled the development of this design here from the beginning, I feel that I should wrap things up here as well.

So here's the news: the Railways of the Western U.S. project (which started life as Hammer & Spike and which was known for a while as Rottweiler) is finally complete, and is available for purchase both online and at your favorite FLGS ("friendly local game store").

I received my copies about a week and a half ago; FRED very kindly sent them to me almost as soon as they had arrived from the printer. I am pleased to report that the production quality is excellent. The map neatly matches up with its Eastern U.S. counterpart. The City Rotor pieces are indeed very cool (see photos by my friend Marlin Deckert here and here). Everything's there that should be there, including the Fuel Depot bits that were missing from the Essen copies. And Helen got her urgent request satisfied: the player aid cards have an image of the Rotor Cities' "rainbow pie chart", so you can see the order of the colors.

My copies came before the product had appeared in stores, so I was surprised and gratified when Marlin showed up at game night a few days later with a copy he'd purchased at our own FLGS, Game Kastle in San Jose. This was, in a manner of speaking, the first copy we'd seen "in the wild". We stopped in there last Friday night ourselves, and sure enough, there were two copies sitting out on the Christmas gift suggestion display table.

I've been trying not to pollute this post with a lot of superfluous exclamation points, but they're here in spirit. It's been most gratifying to see the final product, see that people are buying it, and see the ratings going up on its BoardGameGeek page.

So what's next? I'm not sure. I have about a half-dozen half-baked ideas for new game designs, and there is an excellent chance of another expansion for Railways of the World. When I know, I'll let you know!

News from Essen

2010-10-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

Spiel Essen, the world's largest and most prestigious game fair, took place in Essen Germany last weekend. I'd been hoping that Railways of the Western U.S. would be ready in time to be shown there, and it was—just barely!

It seems to be standard practice for the initial printing of a new game product to be very small. This gives the publisher a chance to check the finished product for problems before paying to have thousands of copies made; and if there are no serious problems, the publisher has a few advance copies to show off and/or sell. The first shipment of Railways of the Western U.S. arrived in Essen on the morning of the first day of the show, just in time. It was 60 copies, and they immediately opened one copy and set it up to be shown off.

The BoardGameGeek web site (one of my favorite web destinations) had a presence at the show: they were interviewing publishers, and live-streaming video demos of the new games. Keith Blume demoed RotWUS for them on that first day, and if you're interested you can watch the video here. It's quick, only about three minutes.

The game sold out quickly; all 60 copies were gone by the second day of the show.

There was indeed one problem with those first few copies: there were no Fuel Depot tokens in the boxes. Fortunately those are not necessary components; they are used only with an optional rule, and you can play just fine without them. The people who purchased those copies can get replacement Fuel Depot tokens by contacting FRED Distribution customer service. If you are not one of the lucky few who got to go to Essen you won't have to worry about this, because it will be fixed for the first full print run.

The City Rotor tokens, the other new optional feature in the expansion, were included and apparently are pretty cool. I say "apparently" because I haven't seen them myself. Helen and I didn't go to Essen (we talked about going, but couldn't swing it this year) and so now there are some 60 people in the world who have actual copies of Railways of the Western U.S., and I'm not one of them! I've never even seen a copy I didn't make myself. There's something cosmically unfair about this, or so I keep telling myself.

But FRED says that the first real shipment will arrive soon, in just a couple of weeks. Then I should have my own copy at last, and they'll be available in both brick-and-mortar and online stores. Can't wait!

Suddenly, Spatial Delivery

2010-10-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a lot of time for game design work recently. Until a month or so ago, I was finishing up Railways of the Western U.S. (okay, that's game design, but it's still only an expansion and not a complete game!), and since it was sent to the printers other things have taken precedence.

But now Spatial Delivery has reclaimed my attention, after months and years of neglect. It started when we heard of a publisher that might be interested in it. I emphasize might because so far it's as tenuous as a rumor; but from what we've heard, SD might be the kind of game this publisher is looking for. That set me to thinking again about the game's biggest weaknesses, and how they might be addressed. Then yesterday over lunch, Helen and I were kicking this around, and she had a brilliant-sounding idea. Today we tried it out. A little to my surprise, the part that sounded most brilliant didn't get much play, but after some experiments and more discussion, we developed a new set of rules that feel like a great improvement.

The new rules seem to solve several problems. They added tension, competition, and interest to the card draft. They eliminated a complaint of many playtesters who didn't like that drafted cards remained vulnerable until the draft was over. And it helped balance out the turn-order bias that's been a nagging concern for a while.

Like all new rule ideas, it needs more playtest before we can really assess it. Also I will have to rewrite the rulebook and cheat sheets, and design a side-board to hold a score track, player order track, and round counter. This will take a little while to get together.

But I'm encouraged. Cross your fingers!

(Julie Haehn, if you're reading this, I will send you the copy I promised... after the rules have settled down and the new components are ready!)

Another progress report

2010-07-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

My posts seem to be coming farther and farther apart. I apologize for that. I think there are a couple of reasons for it. One is simply that I've been very busy, and have had little time (and when I have time, little energy) for posting. Another is that I haven't been doing anything worth the waste of bandwidth: nothing to say. But I think I've accumulated enough tidbits to make a new post worthwhile, so here goes.

Railways of the Western U.S.
I haven't had much to say about this because my part in it is nearly done. (There's even a page up at BGG for it: Railways of the Western U.S.) But I can report that we (myself and the folks at Eagle Games) have been proof-reading digital copies of the board, the rules, the cards, and the box art, and it's looking really good. The board has been designed to match the Eastern U.S. board esthetically as well as physically, and I think they'll look great together on the table.

The rules are receiving the last few tweaks. My Fuel Depot rules have been tossed in favor of some different ones that the Eagle Games folks dreamed up, and I agree that theirs are much better. I'm eager to try them out myself, now that I know what they are! I'm hoping to get the game on the table at Pacificon over Labor Day weekend.

And after the digital proof-reading is done, it's back to being patient while it goes through the cycles of printed proofs, final approval, printing, assembling, and shipping. (Still waiting for my instant gratification, here!)

Solitaire Till Dawn X
It's been hard to work on this because I do 8 hours or more of programming at work, five days a week, and I'm often feeling pretty burned out by the time I get home. But I am making progress. Today I got some very insidious bugs out of the BooleanTest class (which is used for things like deciding whether you're stuck, or have won the game), and in the process greatly sped up the program's ability to peer into the future of the game as you play it. That could be very useful—we'll see!

New Game Designs
Yes, I have a couple of new designs! With Rottweiler mostly out the door, I've been able to spend some time thinking about such things.

I actually have three that I'm turning over in my head. All are in very early design stages; only two have even been mocked up to try a solo game on my own, and that has happened only once for each of them. But they each feature one or two newish ideas that interest me.

Without going into a lot of detail, one is centered around buying your resources from a "futures" market: if you think you can wait to get them, you can get them cheaper. Of course, there will be time pressure to get them more quickly, and damn the expense!

A second grew out of an idle notion to make a game with Genghis Khan as a theme. The Great Khan was not just a warrior, and there were some interesting economic things happening in his empire. Instead of a battle game, I began to wonder if there wasn't an interesting area-majority game lurking in there somewhere. Area majority has been done before of course, but for this game I'm hoping to introduce a trading-with-foreigners twist.

The third new design grew out of the second. I was looking for an interesting scoring mechanism for it, and thought of one so interesting that it turned into a whole new game. This is the one that has my attention at the moment, and it has been developed more than the other two (not that that's saying much). It is also an area-majority game, with twists in both the area-majority mechanism and in the scoring.

I always have high hopes for any new design, and they usually turn out somewhere between rather dull and utter garbage. We'll see about these.

Various Kinds of Progress

2010-06-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

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!

Solitaire Redux (yet again)

2010-04-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

In 1991, almost 20 years ago now, I launched a new software product in my Semicolon Software line of tools and toys for Apple Macintosh computers. It was a package of nine solitaire card games, called Solitaire Till Dawn. Helen and I put a freeware demo out on the BBS and user-group circuits (there was no World Wide Web yet!), and mailed the full version on a floppy disk, with a printed manual, to anyone who sent us a check or cash for it.

Solitaire Till Dawn sold a couple of copies per week over the next year or so. It was the product that convinced me that I should write a lot of small products rather than a few big ones, because all of my products seemed to sell about two copies per week. Putting a lot of effort into one or two big products didn't seem cost-effective, when my smaller and quickly-developed tools were making just as much money.

The Competitive Instinct

A couple of years later, the TidBITS online newsletter reviewed a competing solitaire package, and compared it to Solitaire Till Dawn. The competing package was obviously better, but sales of Solitaire Till Dawn went up. (Apparently it's true: there's no such thing as bad publicity!)

But I didn't like being outdone. I put a lot of work into Solitaire Till Dawn, and released version 2.0 in 1994. It was a big improvement, but this version's real significance was that it was designed to be distributed and sold on-line. The Internet was growing, and we became one of the earliest adopters of Kagi, perhaps the Web's first on-line store. We gratefully stopped fussing with printed manuals, floppy disks, and mailing envelopes, and sat back to watch the money roll in.

And it did roll in! Sales went up by a factor of ten. I changed my plan: I never developed another new Semicolon Software product after that, and instead concentrated on improving Solitaire Till Dawn.

Aggressive Development

The good news was that we were now making significant income from our home business, where before it had been pocket change that I used to buy the occasional new computer or software package. The bad news was that I no longer had a hobby; I had a second job. The income belonged to the business and not to me. We were relying on that extra income (we had kids now!), and I couldn't use it for mad money any more.

But I was still having fun. I continued to add new games and features to Solitaire Till Dawn for several more years, until Apple threw me a curve by introducing Mac OS X.

The Mistake

Solitaire Till Dawn wouldn't run on Mac OS X. For a while that didn't matter. Most Macs still ran the classic Mac OS. But OS X usage grew, and our sales declined. So I sat down once again to do some real development work.

And here I made a mistake. I didn't have a Mac OS X machine myself. So rather than dive into Cocoa and Xcode (the OS X native development environment), I used the Carbon framework instead and stuck with reliable old Metrowerks CodeWarrior. Using Carbon meant I could run my new version on both classic and Mac OS X, which meant I could do most of my testing on my old Mac. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Consequences

It took me two years to complete the new version. But by then, the pent-up demand was enormous, and our sales were huge. For a while, especially the first couple of years, we were riding high.

But I'd built an Achilles heel into Solitaire Till Dawn X. CodeWarrior had been the best Mac development environment you could get for years, but nothing lasts forever. Metrowerks eventually stopped supporting the Mac. Okay (said I to myself, said I), my old copy still runs just fine. But then came the next bomb from Apple: the switch to Intel processors in 2006.

Bad news indeed! CodeWarrior could not compile for Intel chips. Theoretically you could take an old CodeWarrior project and import it into Apple's Xcode, and compile it for Intel. But I could never get that to work, and even if it had worked, it would have been just another stopgap, leaving Solitaire Till Dawn still dependent on Carbon. Carbon doesn't support some nifty new OS X features, and someday (I am sure) Carbon itself will fail me, when Apple eventually decides to abandon it.

Our Hero Leaps Into Action

Now was the time for me to get busy again! I needed to re-write Solitaire Till Dawn in Cocoa. I set right to it... and bogged down within a few weeks. I was burnt out! I'd written an unreleased predecessor to Solitaire Till Dawn in 1989 or so. I wrote version 1.0 from the ground up in 1991, and worked on it almost continuously for ten years. I wrote it from scratch again in 2001-2002 for OS X. I'd had two CPU chips, one operating system, and a development environment shot out from under me over the course of 15 years. And I found that I just couldn't face writing yet another solitaire program—never mind one that would have to be bigger and better than any of its predecessors!

Apple has always been good about backward compatibility, and it gave me an excuse to be lazy. To this day, Solitaire Till Dawn X runs quite well on Intel Macs, using Apple's "Rosetta" compatibility layer. But users want Intel-native apps. And now Apple has shipped Mac OS X 10.6, in which Rosetta is not automatically installed. It's still available, easy to install, and free; but it's another barrier to new customers for Solitaire Till Dawn.

The result of all this has been a steady decline in sales, and it's my fault. I made a bad decision when I first built Solitaire Till Dawn X, and I ran out of steam when it was time to fix that mistake. Now I'm four years late.

Our Hero Leaps Into Action (again)

Why am I blathering at you about this? For the same reason that some people talk about their diet plans and New Year's resolutions: in the hope that the fear of public shame will keep them on course. I have resurrected my old attempt to re-write Solitaire Till Dawn in Cocoa, and I have made significant progress with it. But it's going to take a while—months at least—and I'll need to keep my resolve and work on it every night that I have at least an hour of free time. If I succeed, I can hope for resurgent sales, and our household economy could certainly use that.

And maybe... just maybe, I'll have energy left to look into making an iPad version. It's clearly the new wave: there is likely more money in that than in Mac software. But here I am again, unable to afford the hot new hardware and unwilling to try to develop for a machine I can't test on. So I'm going to do the OS X version first. If I finish that, it should be a good starting point for an iPad version, because iPad apps are also built with Cocoa. I am making no promises about iPads yet, but I'd like to own one of the shiny things, and this would make a great excuse.

I just have to keep my nose to the grindstone, and hope that Apple doesn't shoot yet another processor, platform, or development environment out from under me.

[Read more about the history of Solitaire Till Dawn, if you're interested. I'll post small updates about my progress at the upper-left corner of this blog, and perhaps some longer dissertations as regular blog posts from time to time.]

Coast-to-coast live!

2010-04-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

This weekend we held the first live playtest of Continental Rottweiler: "live" means that we had four actual human beings playing the game, as opposed to just me, or Helen and me, pretending to be more than one person each. I'm pleased to report that it went very well.

The game lasted about six hours, and was contentious from beginning to end. I had been hoping for a fifth player, but the game worked quite well with four. The fact that everyone wanted to cross the "border" between the east and west tended to crowd players together; on the Western board, the Rockies were another barrier that focused nearly everyone's efforts. I think there's room for a fifth player, but surprisingly, six may turn out to be too many.

The new rules for handling the "income trough" seemed to work well. We used a rule that Helen had proposed: at mid-game, players may give back any number of the bonds they've taken out at a penalty of 2 VPs per bond. This rule is intended to walk a careful tightrope. I want players to be able to take out lots of shares without worrying about surviving the income troughs later on. On the other hand, it should cost something to get rid of a bond at mid-game; otherwise, it is too easy to take out bonds just before mid-game, knowing that you will soon be rid of them. In addition, it gives players another interesting decision to make: keep the bonds and avoid the extra VP penalty, or dump them and avoid the income penalty?

I have one reservation about giving back the bonds: in this session nearly everyone gave back all their bonds, and the one player who didn't regretted it. It may be that 2 VP is too cheap, and at that price you should nearly always give back all your bonds. But I'm going to let a few more games go by before I try increasing the penalty. That will tell me whether the cost is really too low, or whether it was just the way this one game played out.

My other concern is the Rail Baron cards. I put together a set specific to the Continental game, having found in previous playtests that the ones from the Eastern and Western games don't work as well on the combined boards. For the most part the new barons were good, but there were a couple of false notes. One is that the VP bonuses in the base game and its other expansions are about 10% of a typical final score. But final scores in the Continental game are much higher; if the Rail Baron bonuses aren't increased to match, players will not have much incentive to try to achieve their Baron goals. I think therefore that the Continental Baron bonuses need to be significantly larger than those for the base game. The other issue is ensuring that those bonuses are balanced. There were indications that some of the goals are much harder to achieve than others. A little of that is okay, but the differences shouldn't be huge.

All along I've been worried that the Continental game would take too long, and outlast its welcome. But the players stayed after the game for well over an hour, vigorously discussing their strategies and the reasons for their decisions. Nobody got bored, and they all want to play it again. Whew! Obviously, not everyone will want to play a six-hour game no matter how good it is, but I think we've got something that at least a real RotW enthusiast will enjoy.

More playtests will follow, as soon as I can get them together!

Coast-to-coast again

2010-02-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

This weekend we tried another coast-to-coast session of Rottweiler. This was only the second such session. Because of the holidays and nearly two months (and counting) of major home renovation, I haven't had the time or the table space to lay out so large and long a game.

But on Saturday we managed it. And it was a pretty good session, in two senses. First, lessons learned from the first session led to noticeable improvements. And second, we learned a lot about what still needs work.

The first session had two major problems. One was that it didn't last long enough; the far coast was barely reached and wasn't developed, which didn't feel right. We solved that this time with a tweak to the end-game trigger rule. The other was the issue of the "income trough", as follows.

We have been using the score/income track from the base game. In Railways of the World, your income is tied to your current score. It rises for most of the game, then begins to fall again at a point somewhere after midgame. Typically it never rises again, but if you score above 100 points you wrap the scoreboard and you begin to repeat the cycle.

For the base game, this works just fine. The income curve is calibrated to keep money tight throughout the game, so that players must always think about their budgets. For much of the game you need money for expansion and development, but in the end game you are usually busy milking what you have already built rather than spending on new track, so you don't need as much money.

For the coast-to-coast game, this falls apart. The high score in this weekend's session was a whopping 240 points: that player wrapped the scoreboard twice. This means that his income started at zero, rose to a high point, then fell to zero again, and then did it all over a second time, finishing with a rise to a third high point. The trouble with this is simple: the coast-to-coast game requires players to continue to expand for at least twice as many rounds as the base game. Unless you have managed to become rich, you're going to be starving for money when you are in the "income trough". You can even get into a horrible debt spiral if you have issued very many bonds, because you must pay dividends on them and this can exceed your income by quite a bit.

In the first session, I saw this as a problem that might be acceptable as part of the strategy of the coast-to-coast game: you need to build up a fund of cash during times of high income, so that it will see you through the low-income periods. But in both sessions, at least one player failed in this; and the consequences are severe. Such a player falls badly behind and cannot catch up, and has to play for another three hours not only unable to win, but even unable to make any progress. The fact that the second session lasted through two income troughs makes it even worse.

So I'm going to have to think about the income curve for the coast-to-coast game. A number of solutions have been proposed, but I haven't had time to think them all through yet. The ideal solution will be one in which most players must budget carefully throughout the game, but without quite such severe penalties for failure; and it will allow players to issue plenty of bonds if they need to. (If you think I'm being too soft-hearted toward my players, think again. It's one thing to lose; it's quite another to be so wedged that you can hardly even play, especially in so long a game.)

When I've got a good-sounding solution for the income problem, I may be ready to try a "live" game with a full table of real players. So far it's just been Helen and me, each pretending to be two different people in order to make up four simulated players. Helen is tolerant, but I don't want to burden my other playtesters with a six-hour unplayable horror of a game, so I want to get this smoothed out at home before taking it out in public.

WebComics: Dave Kellett's "Sheldon"

2010-01-26T23:46:00.000-08:00

I've loved the funnies all my life. I learned to read from a Peanuts comic book, and have been reading the funny pages in the newspaper ever since. One of my grandmothers, the one who lived some distance away and who we therefore couldn't see very often, always brought me another Peanuts collection whenever she visited. (That was not the only thing I loved about her, but it certainly didn't hurt!)

My dad loved Pogo, which is still my nominee for the greatest comic ever. Walt Kelly provided wit, contemporary satire, brilliant artwork, and deep and endearing characterization, every day for decades.

It was only relatively recently that I discovered that you could get quality funnies from other sources than the newspaper and the bookstore. The Web has made it almost trivially easy for a wanna-be comic artist to start a strip and get it in front of eyeballs. I stumbled almost by accident into a world of literally hundreds, if not thousands, of strips I'd never heard of.

Most of them will never appear in a newspaper (even if that venerable institution survives, which seems less likely every day). The major reason is that most of them are awful: bad art, little wit. Sturgeon's Law applies, and perhaps with even greater force because the barrier to entry is so low.

Some will never appear in a newspaper because newspapers are aimed at families. Quite a few web comics are aimed at adults, and their content is unsuitable for an audience of all ages. Of these, Sturgeon's Law applies again: many are merely in poor taste, but a few handle adult subjects with grace and wit.

My favorites are listed in a sidebar over on the right-hand side of this page. I need hardly say that I recommend them all, with the caveat that several of them do deal with mature subject matter.

The occasion for this post is my discovery of Dave Kellett's Sheldon. Sheldon actually is a family strip, in a couple of senses of the word. I don't really care about that, either way. Sheldon appeals to me because it achieves what I think of as the comic strip hat trick: it has good artwork, good wit, and appealing characters.

It took me a while to reach that realization. When I started reading Sheldon, I thought of it as competently done but unexceptional. I almost gave up on it. I kept reading largely because I was all caught up on other strips I liked better, and needed that funnies fix. And over time, I began to realize its quality. An example: one of the characters in the strip is a lizard named Flaco. The only thing Flaco ever says is "squee." You might not think you could squeeze (sorry) very much juice out of that; at least, I didn't. But over time, Flaco's character has grown in depth. He has a distinct personality and his own style of joie de vivre; and you would not believe how much expressive range "squee" has in Kellett's capable hands. He hand-letters the strip and brings the words (even "squee") to vivid life with creative typography.

So I'm now a convert, and I thought it only fair to bring your attention to this understated, marvelous strip. Sheldon now runs six days a week, with Saturday given over to Kellett's new sci-fi storyline, "Drive". (Kellett promises that his web site will eventually give Drive separate-but-equal housing with Sheldon, but for now it's just the Saturday installment on the Sheldon site.)

In future posts I will probably devote attention to some of my other favorite online strips and graphic novels. For now I'll just mention Kukuburi, which has not been around very long but which promises to be fantastic.

Enjoy!

Zen and the Art of Second Cornet

2010-01-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I again had the pleasure of performing with Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band, and as usual these days, I played second cornet to Leon Oakley's lead. Rae Ann Berry was on hand to film part of the last set*, which gives me a relatively rare opportunity to listen to my performance from the audience's viewpoint.

Lately I've been wishing that I'd had more opportunities to hear recordings of myself over the years. Recordings are devastatingly honest. When you are playing, you tend to hear what you meant to play, but a recording relentlessly makes you listen to what you actually played, and gives you a more balanced view of how it fits (or doesn't) with what the rest of the band was doing. It can be painful but is very educational.

And I need this education... and not because I want to play first cornet, but because second cornet is hard.**

The JRJB is a two-cornet band, in the style of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band of the 1920's and Lu Watters's Yerba Buena Jazz Band of the 1940's. Most trad bands have only one cornet, along with the usual one trombone and one reed in the front line. That gives each player a fair amount of freedom, because those three instruments are expected to play independent lines more than close harmonies. But twin cornets have to play together . That's a word that covers a lot of ground.

Theory

You might expect harmony to be simple, and often it is. Trad jazz tunes usually have simple chords and progressions. The second cornet could just play the root of the chord when the melody is on the third, and the third when the melody plays anything else; but this gets boring for player and listener alike. Fortunately there are things you can do to spice it up. Leading tones, suspensions, passing tones, and notes that suggest a more complex chord progression all add flavor and make the two-cornet sound lively and interesting. I'm also fond of "moving" lines: harmonies that almost sound like another melody.

Phrasing is definitely not simple. In a symphony orchestra you take your phrasing from the lead player for your instrument or section, and you have rehearsals in which the phrasing is first decided, then practiced by all. In a jazz band, you have to take both a longer and a shorter-term view. "Longer" because, instead of getting used to a particular phrase, you have to get used to the player himself, and learn how he thinks. "Shorter" because you can still be surprised, and you have to keep your ears open and make adjustments on the spot in live performance.

Counterpoint is both a staple and a last resort for the second cornetist. It is a staple because good counterpoint is wonderful and worth doing for its own sake. But it can also be a last resort because you really can't always play tight harmony. If the lead decides to improvise wildly, a normal harmony line will just sound lame. So instead, you improvise melodies and interjections of your own. It has to be something that will fit the chords and the mood, and that won't overpower or clash with whatever the lead is playing. (The latter usually means staying low while the lead plays high, and quickly moving to a different note when you find yourself in unison.) Often a good technique is to play "fill". Cornets are wind instruments: as if speaking, they play distinct phrases with predictable pauses for breath. The second cornet can pause when the lead is playing, and play during the lead's pauses. There may be considerable overlap, which is fine; but the offset phrasing minimizes collisions and gives the second cornet a distinct voice and identity that's often lacking in tight harmony.

Practice

Playing second cornet can be a strain. It's more complex that the major points I've outlined above, and it has to be done in real time—the band won't wait while you figure out what to play. And music theory isn't the only hurdle you have to master; there are practical considerations as well.

The JRJB plays arrangements out of a book, in which the lead and second cornet parts are carefully written out, note for note. Because I only play with the band a few times per year, I'm effectively sight-reading these tunes. I'm not too bad a sight-reader, but what I'm reading is usually a 40-year-old, fourth-generation Xerox copy of an original written by someone whose copy hand wasn't that good to begin with.

The copyist has felt free to summarize entire sections of the tune with notations like "B3 as B1" which makes you suddenly have to hunt back over sections D, C, and the interlude to find the "B1" mark; by the time you've found it, you're three or four bars into it already. The copy you're reading from has decades of wear, tears, discoloration, coffee**** stains, and fading. It has been scribbled on in pen and pencil to fix mistakes, insert or delete choruses, change intros and endings—and many of these alterations are out of date. Just reading it correctly is no easy task.

And reading it correctly isn't always correct! Those carefully-designed harmony lines in the second cornet part only work if the lead plays his carefully-designed written-out part... and he often doesn't. (And he's not supposed to. Jazz, remember!) When the lead decides to wander too far from what's written, or when I've gotten lost on the page, then I have to fake something. Usually Leon will stay fairly close to the page in the opening choruses; I don't have to fake much unless I get lost, and then only until I can find my place again. But later in the tune, especially on the out-choruses, Leon often just closes his eyes and plays what he likes. Then I just have to listen extra hard, and get creative, and be ready to return to the written music when we reach the hook, which should be given plenty of punch...

Nope, not easy. But if I do it well, nobody may ever know that I wasn't blithely reading the entire thing. I can just stand there and look smug when the tune is over!

* Salty Bubble and Tiger Moan came out pretty good, I think.

** "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." — Sir Donald Wolfit***
"Math is hard!" — Barbie

*** Or somebody else.

**** I guess.

Rottweiler: Coast-to-Coast

2009-12-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

I see I've been lax about blogging lately. That's mostly because I haven't been doing much that I felt would be of interest: some gaming, some music, a nice Thanksgiving with the family. Recently we've begun remodeling the house, and that may prompt some commentary at some point.

But last weekend, Helen and I pushed the Rottweiler map edge-to-edge with its matching previously-published map, and we played our first "continental" game. I'd cobbled together a rule set for what would clearly be a long game, and knew that it would need playtesting to get right. The results were mixed: some good news, some bad.

The good news is that it was an interesting game. It definitely felt different from any other RotW game we've played (and we've played them all), and the new strategies it evoked were challenging and fun. I also felt that it wouldn't need much tuning to really get it right—although that may be unjustified optimism. But there were a few issues that will have to be addressed.

One issue is the income/score track. RotW and Railroad Tycoon veterans know that your income goes up as your score goes up, until a bit after mid-game when your income begins to decline as your score continues to rise. Thematically this represents the overhead of running a large railroad; from a game design standpoint it's to keep cash scarce and make players budget. If you perform well, you can wrap the scoring track and your income begins to rise again. Normally this happens late or not at all, but in the continental game it will happen at about mid-game. It's a bad time to be short of cash.

In our one playtest (Helen and I managing two players each) one player hit the trough just wrong, with no saved cash and no cheap prospects for getting out of the trough; that player finished last. Another player had to build track aggressively, to delay entering the trough until he could rush past it in a sudden flurry of deliveries; that player finished second-to-last. The other two players were either already past the trough or had enough cash on hand that it wasn't an issue; they finished first and second.

The continental game is long, and I don't want miring players in the income trough to be a frequent occurrence. They'd have to spend a couple more hours finishing the game with no prospect of winning. But it may be that it's never necessary for an experienced player to be stuck, if you know to plan ahead. One simple solution is an optional rule for beginners: once your income first climbs above $10 or $15, it never falls below that level. Experienced players can use the unmodified income/score track for a more challenging game.

The biggest actual problem we encountered was a shortage of pieces. There are simply not enough goods cubes, track tiles, or even control locos in a single base set. I'll be talking with the publisher about how to handle this. The decision will be up to them, but the obvious possibilities include putting the extra bits in the expansion, making a "Continental Pack" available separately, or simply requiring the bits from two base games.

Progress! I hope to try the continental game again soon with real players, but Christmas may intervene. When it happens, I'll post again.

JRJB Now Available Online

2009-11-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

As I'd hoped, the new album I recorded with Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band can now be purchased online. You can find it at Worlds Records Music Store, and you can click here to go straight to its page. (Links to product offerings can change over time. If that link stops working, go to their main page and search for "Ted Shafer", then find the album with my name in the personnel list. Ted's other albums are good too!)

There's been a bit of back-and-forth about the album's title and cover art. The title used to be just "New Orleans Jazz"; but Ted and Leon decided that the album just looked too much like earlier JRJB albums with similar covers and titles. Now the band is billed as the "2009 Jelly Roll Jazz Band" on the front cover, and under that, "with Guest Artists Leon Oakley and Ray Skjelbred". The cover art is also different. Some of my, ah, more elderly and/or better educated readers may recognize the source of the new artwork.

The World Records store Web page shows the original cover art, and lists the CD under the name "New Orleans Jazz Volume 3". I don't know which cover you'll actually get if you order from them. All very confusing: but it's still the same album with the same music!

I've just learned that the pianist on the album, Ray Skjelbred, has a Web site which lists the recordings he's made over the years, and has links for purchasing them. Ray is an amazing performer. It's a real thrill for me to hear his distinctive piano style on the JRJB album after listening to it for years on recordings by Turk Murphy. Ray has recorded several solo albums as well as sessions with Turk, Bob Schulz, Hal Smith, Clint Baker, Bob Helm, and more. His range includes bluegrass and western as well as trad jazz. Head on over to Ray's Recordings page at www.rayskjelbred.com and check them out. The new JRJB album will be listed there soon, too.

Rottweiler: Linking Up

2009-10-28T22:59:00.001-07:00

Hints have been dropped here and there, so I suppose I won't get in hot water now for mentioning that the map I'm working on is designed to link up with other maps. For the last couple of weeks, I've been redrawing it because the hex size on the original was slightly too small. It was good enough to play on, but when set edge-to-edge with a published map, the hexes wouldn't line up.

The new map is a hex or two narrower, so I also needed to adjust the locations of some cities and features. Today I got a full-size printout, and brought it home. I am pleased to report that it lines up quite nicely. I should be able to try some combined-board games sometime soon.

But I did need to make more changes. With the maps joined, it was apparent that some cities at the edges are poorly placed. I had to move a few cities, and rename two of them so that their names would be more appropriate to their new locations.

I did a solo playtest last night on the previous map. The current iteration of the rules and new features held up well, and I liked the way the session played out. But I'm now starting to notice some subtle things about the map: I may change the color of a city or two. Since I print the maps in grayscale and hand-color the cities, I think the new map is ready to be printed. I can think about city colors in the meantime.

"New Orleans Jazz"

2009-10-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

Back in May, I posted about recording with Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band. I was terrifically excited because the other band members are all excellent musicians—some are among the best in the genre. I don't often get to perform with so high-powered a group, and the thought of actually getting a CD of the occasion felt almost overwhelming. Since doing the recording I've been on tenterhooks, waiting for the arrival of the finished CD. Yesterday it arrived!

I'm very happy with the album. The sound quality seems excellent, with good definition and stereo separation, and the voices are well-balanced. I can hear the two cornets as a blend, but I can also "focus down" and hear my own performance, even in the full ensemble parts. The individual performances of the other musicians are wonderful. For my own part I think I managed not to embarrass myself too badly.

Here's an excerpt, the final out chorus from "Ostrich Walk". (Sorry about the cheesy Ken Burns video, but this blog site won't let me post pure audio clips! The artwork is the cover of the CD.)

Purchasing the CD

A few folks have asked, so here's how to get it. (Rest assured, I will not be offended by anyone who doesn't rush to buy a copy. This is a niche music; not everybody loves it like I do!)

The CD is currently available only by mail order. There are a couple of Web sites that offer some of the band's other albums, and I'm hoping they'll have this new one soon. If so, I'll post a link to them. In the meantime, if you want a copy you'll have to do the following:

Make out a check for $16.00 to "Merry Makers Record Company". Send it to the following address, and specify that you want "Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band: New Orleans Jazz -- 50th Anniversary". Be sure to specify this product code: MMRC-CD-38, and of course, don't forget to include your postal address. The $16.00 includes shipping within the continental U.S. If you are not in the U.S., the price is 19.00 USD and includes overseas shipping. Here's the address:

Merry Makers Record Company

926 Beechwood Circle

Suisun City, CA 94585

About the music

This is a two-cornet band in the style of Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (KOCJB), which played in Chicago in the early 1920's. I like to think of the KOCJB as the band that was so hot, they had Louis Armstrong playing second cornet. The Jelly Roll Jazz Band is also influenced by Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band, which was the first revival (post-1920's) traditional jazz band, and which established the West Coast style of trad jazz.

My cornet partner in this band is Leon Oakley, possibly the finest living trad jazz cornetist. It is tempting to remain silent in order to claim, by implication, more of the credit than I deserve for the cornet work. But the vast majority of the lead cornet parts and cornet solos are Leon's. (And with good reason!) I mostly play the second (harmony) cornet parts. I do get some solo choruses and breaks, and occasionally an arrangement would call for us to switch parts so that I play lead for a while.

Once you're used to Leon's powerful and assured playing, it's pretty easy to recognize my own lesser efforts. However I will mention that on one number, "Chimes Blues", I do play lead throughout and also play the cornet solo. I was happy with the way that one came out. Also on "King of the Zulus" the first 16-bar cornet solo is Leon's, and the one immediately following is mine; and I play lead on the first chorus following those solos. Leon returns to lead the final out chorus.

Personnel: Leon Oakley and Rick Holzgrafe, cornets; Glenn Calkins, trombone; Pete Main, reeds; Ray Skjelbred, piano; Tom Downs and Howard Miyata, tuba; Bert Thompsen, drums; Ken Keeler and Ted Shafer, banjos. (This band has two cornets and two banjos, but not two tubas! Tom Downs played tuba for one of the two recording sessions, and Howard Miyata played the other. The liner notes specify which tunes each of them played.)

Tune list:

Ostrich Walk
Aunt Hagar's Blues
Alligator Hop
Terrible Blues
Tiger Moan
Snag It
Grandpa's Spells
King of the Zulus
I'm Going Away to Wear You Off My Mind
Chimes Blues
Buddy's Habit
Of All the Wrongs
Krooked Blues
New Orleans Stomp
Jazzin' Babies Blues
Tears
Room Rent Blues
Midnight Mama
Sorry
Bay City
Here Come the Hot Tamale Man

Librarians Say More Than "Shh!"

2009-10-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

My friend J.C. Lawrence passed this along via Twitter: Uncle Bobby's Wedding, a blog post by librarian Jamie Larue. It is an incredibly well-reasoned (and well-written) response to a library patron who wanted a particular book removed or sequestered. I find it remarkable not only for its defense of free speech, but for its respect for the differing points of view found in our heterogenous and contentious society.

(As a side note, Mr. Larue's blog site gave me a little moment of deja vú because it is formatted almost identically to my own. But that's a coincidence.)

Free Games Friday at Tasty Minstrel Games

2009-09-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

Tasty Minstrel Games is gearing up for the release of its first two games, Terra Prime and Homesteaders. I'm excited about both of these games: I helped playtest Terra Prime, and Homesteaders just looks like the kind of game Helen and I will love. The photos (and video!) of the games look great; Tasty Minstrel went all-out to produce a pair of quality products. Both games are currently available for pre-order at great prices (I've already placed my order!), and TMG hopes to ship them in mid-autumn of this year. (To pre-order, follow the video link and scroll down.)

As part of their startup promotions, TMG is hosting Free Games Friday: every Friday they give away a free board game to someone randomly selected from their email newsletter subscribers. The games are from TMG founder Michael Mindes' own collection, and there are some good ones in there. I'd be participating in that, but I already own most of them myself!

I'm posting about all this for several reasons. First, I think these are going to be fine games, well produced, and as I said above, the pre-order prices can't be beat. Second, if they continue as they have started, TMG will be producing a line of games of similar quality, and I want to see that happen. Third, the TMG developer (and designer of Terra Prime) is my good buddy Seth Jaffee, so I'm doing all I can to help Seth and Michael promote their business. And finally... well, Helen wants one of their plush dragons, and apparently I can get one for her if I post about Free Games Friday in this blog!

Now, I wonder what the expiration date is on that old bag of Dragon Chow that's stashed in the garage...

Battle of the Bands!

2009-09-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was pretty busy. On Saturday I had a three-hour gig with the Mission Gold Jazz Band down in Monterey. That went very well; the band had fun, and the audience did too: we had people dancing whose ages ranged from the teenagers manning the food booths up to the senior citizens.

Sunday I drove back to Monterey again, for the Monterey Dixieland club's "Battle of the Bands." Monterey holds a three-day jazz festival, the "Jazz Bash by the Bay", every year in March. Bands appear by invitation only. For their 30th anniversary in 2010, they decided to hold a competition to select one "wild card" band to appear at the Jazz Bash in 2010. Four bands competed, and I was in two of them.

One of my bands was brand-new: Valerie Johnson and her King Bees. Sunday was our premiere performance. But I have played with Val and nearly everyone else in the group before, and it's always good music and great fun. Val sings songs ranging from naughty novelty songs, to the blues à la Bessie Smith, to gospel. She's the best jazz singer I know. You can hear Val sing with the Creole Syncopators here: Valerie Johnson: Good Tunes.

My other band was the Mission Gold Jazz Band, a group I've been performing with for over 15 years. We've had our ups and downs during those years, but bandleader John Soulis has always tried to keep to the King Oliver / Lu Watters two-cornet style. After 15 years I can play a lot of these tunes in my sleep; but I don't, because a really rockin' two-cornet band is (in my opinion, anyway!) considerably more exciting than, say, the SuperBowl.

Sunday's challenge for me was that I was playing trombone with the King Bees, and cornet with Mission Gold. Now, I'll tell you a secret: playing a brass instrument is an unnatural act. It takes considerable development of the embouchure (the muscles around your mouth and in your lips) to be able to do it at all. Switching between a low-register instrument like the trombone, and a high-register instrument like the cornet, adds a whole new layer of challenge to it. I've been asked how the hell I do it, more than once, by other brass players. (Usually I answer, "Badly.") On Sunday, I had fifteen minutes to jump off the stage after the King Bees' set, run and change my yellow-and-black shirts for the MGJB's button-down shirt and tie, run back and move my stands and horns around, and tighten up my chops for cornet work. Twice. Believe me, I was tired when it was all over.

I'm sorry to report that the King Bees seemed to be under a curse that day. We didn't get to rehearse because we come from scattered areas around California; Sunday was the very first time we had all played together. Half the band was late to the first set—well, we started only a minute or two late, but they literally ran from their car onto the stage, pulling on shirts as they came; no chance to settle down and focus on music. Then the sound system went bad on us; we couldn't hear each other and nobody but me could hear Val (I was standing next to her).

Nevertheless the band performed well, on the whole. I think the audience didn't realize what level of musicianship they were hearing, some of the time. One tune finished with a spot-on ending that most bands would have had to write out and carefully rehearse; the King Bees just pulled it out of the air. And in the second set we played a tune that the reed player had written out during the break for the benefit of the rhythm section. It was "Never Swat a Fly", in honor of the swarms of bugs we all endured. That tune came off perfectly, again as if we'd rehearsed it. (Side note: I actually did suck down a bug at one point, and had to spit it out again before I could continue playing—bleah! It really wasn't the best conditions I've ever performed in!) The King Bees will be making appearances at other festivals in future, and as we settle in I expect great things.

Mission Gold, on the other hand, had a great day. We did get to rehearse beforehand, for weeks, and we'd had that three-hour gig the day before. We were in top form, and if I may say so, we blew the audience away. Mission Gold won the Battle of the Bands by count of ballots, but I think we could have won it by simple acclamation: we were the only band for whom the audience broke into applause simply because the judges mentioned our name.

So that means that the Mission Gold Jazz Band will appear at Dixieland Monterey's Jazz Bash by the Bay, March 5-7, 2010, along with a host of other fine bands. I expect to have a blast.

Pacificon 2009: Other Games

2009-09-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

We got to try several new (to us) games at Pacificon, and some of them were noteworthy. Here's a quick rundown on the good ones:

Endeavor: I'd been hearing buzz about this game, and it seems to be justified. Endeavor is an appealing combination of worker placement and area control. That's not an unusual set of mechanics these days (see Royal Palace below), but I usually enjoy this genre and Endeavor had some interesting additional mechanics. It is also a "building" game, where you start with few resources and capabilities and try to build them up over the course of the game, and this is another pattern that Helen and I like. In that regard Endeavor felt much like Through the Ages: you need to develop in several different categories at the start of the game, but it's difficult to do so in a quick-yet-balanced fashion. The start-up process is slow, but there seems to be a powerful snowball effect that isn't apparent in the first couple of rounds. Endeavor hasn't leaped to the top of my must-have list because other games we own (especially Goa) offer a similar experience. But it is also different enough from those other games to stand on its own, and we may well pick up a copy one day.

Royal Palace: This is another game of worker placement + area control, but this one reminded us more of Louis XIV. Partly it's the theme, since both are set in the courts of France. But both offer bonuses to the player with the most workers in each location. An interesting twist is that workers are removed from some areas when they are used, so the area control aspect is very fluid. It is possible for every player to have the majority in a given area in succession, as each takes their turn. But unused workers remain, and in some areas workers remain even if used, so it's also possible to build up a big advantage and keep it. Helen commented (and I think I agree—it didn't hurt my opinion that I won our four-player game!) that while she prefers Louis XIV, Royal Palace has the strong advantage of being a good two-player game. I think we will want a copy of this.

Glory to Rome: Helen tried this one and enjoyed it so much, she practically dragged me by the collar to have me try it. I think she was right. This is a card game similar to San Juan and Race for the Galaxy: the salient feature is that every card has multiple uses, but you can use only one of the options for each card. In GtR the cards can be used as resources for building buildings, to trigger actions (such as building, acquiring resources, or cashing them in), or simply stashed away for their face value in victory points. Also as in San Juan and Race for the Galaxy, when a player chooses an action all the other players have a chance to take that action as well. The bottom line: this game has fairly simple rules yet offers many options. Player interaction is high and can lead to a certain amount of chaos, but in a shortish game like Glory to Rome that's okay. Copies of Glory to Rome are rare and are currently expensive. But rumor has it that many more copies exist and are waiting to be delivered into retail channels, so we'll be patient. We will definitely acquire this one when we can.

The Stars Are Right: We are not usually fans of Steve Jackson's card games, which are far too light and chaotic for our taste. The Stars Are Right looks like a typical SJ game, with irreverently cartoony artwork of Cthulhu and his sanity-threatening buddies from H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories. But this game was not actually designed by Jackson, and it has some genuine depth to it: it's what Helen calls a "chewy" game. Like Glory to Rome, the cards have multiple uses; unlike Glory to Rome, there's an array of tiles on the table (the "constellations in the sky") that can be manipulated with your cards, and this gives the game an element of spatial thinking that's missing from most card games. We bought a copy in the dealer's room, and we've been enjoying it.

Martian Rails: We're fans of the Empire Builder crayon rail series, and we could not resist adding this new entry to our collection. It's notable for its "spherical" map: Lunar Rails also has a spherical map, but the one in Martian Rails is easier to deal with. The designer combined the areography of the real, modern Mars with Schiaparelli's illusory canals and with locales and references from classic science fiction: Burroughs, Weinbaum, Clarke, Bradbury, and more. It's practically worth the price of the game just to study the map, but it is also fun to play. The extreme terrain of Mons Olympus and Valles Marineris are there, and pose some unique and entertaining challenges.

Pacificon 2009: Rottweiler

2009-09-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

This Labor Day weekend Helen and I trekked off to Pacificon for three days of intensive gaming. Happily, Pacificon really isn't much of a trek for us: it's about 10 minutes from home, so we could spend all day and half the night at the con and still sleep in our own beds. But because we did game late every night, we we're pretty bushed by the end. (That, and an unexpectedly busy week, makes this a late posting.)

A primary goal for me was to get in a few live playtests of Rottweiler. I'd hoped for three, but got two, which wasn't bad at all. (Lesson learned for future: schedule stuff like this in advance. Trying to get pickup sessions together is unreliable and time-wasteful.) Both sessions went very well, all things considered. I had some experienced players and some newbies; some but not all of the experienced players had seen a prior version of the Rottweiler map. Overall, both sessions "worked": nothing was clearly broken. The balance of the various starting positions wasn't perfect, but of course I don't expect or need it to be; I just need it to not be too horribly unbalanced. Game lengths were a bit shorter than I expected, lasting about two hours or a little less each. I am considering adding a few more empty city markers to extend the game another round or two.

There were some parts that didn't work as well as I'd like. One new feature continues to be troublesome. I've tried a number of variations for it. One such sounds good on paper, but is rarely used in practice—and given that, why bother having the feature at all? Another does get used simply because its rules pretty much require it; but it does not foster competition or interaction among the players, so again it feels pretty pointless to me. I would happily abandon the whole notion, but it's something the publishers are interested in, so I feel that I must make a strong effort to make it work. Then if I fail, I can at least list all the reasons why the feature should be dropped.

A few other items need tweaking or abandonment. There are some Rail Baron and Railroad Operations cards that I added for historical theme; there I may be trying too hard. Some are specific to certain historical locations and events, and wind up feeling like unjustified gifts to those players who build in the area. That's okay as a general rule—Service Bounties are like that—but I have to be careful not to make them too powerful (which is unfair) or too weak (which is pointless). It's surprisingly difficult to balance these things: the granularity of VPs and achievements seems too coarse at times. If I lower the difficulty, the reward is suddenly too great. If I raise the reward, it's too much advantage for the player who achieves the goal. Argh! But I have some other knobs I can tweak, so I think I may yet be able to salvage these items. The map itself seems to be much improved. I didn't find anything in these sessions to suggest any urgent changes, although I did find a couple of "typos" to fix up.

I think the next step is to run a few more solo playtests, to try some tweaks to the troublesome issues. If I can make significant improvements, I'll look for more opportunities for live playtests. The publisher has some groups they want to sic onto Rottweiler, and they seemed to want to start this process in September, so I'll try to get something together for them soon.

Rottweiler: Learning to Heel

2009-08-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

Last night was the first live playtest of Rottweiler, following four solo playtests over the last couple of weeks. I learn more with every play.

Although I've been playing RotW games (under their original "Railroad Tycoon" name) for several years now, this is the first time I've done so while taking a global view. Instead of concentrating on my own plans and paying attention to others only to the degree that they might interfere with me, I am now watching what every player does, and why. It's been very instructive.

I've learned what should have been obvious from the beginning: that the various bonus-scoring opportunities—Major Lines, Service Bounties, and Baron cards—have a large effect in shaping the game. (Major Lines are bonuses for laying track between specified pairs of cities; other bonuses may have similar effects.) For my first cut, I set up the bonuses to motivate players to re-create the historical rail routes. Two plays showed me why that was wrong: it allowed as many as five players to each carve out a separate empire, with little need to get in each other's way. This makes for a boring game.

So I've had to throw out some of the history. I re-worked the Major Lines, removing a couple that routed around the edges of the board, and adding some to draw players together at a couple of central nexuses. The improvement in the game was immediate and marked: suddenly there was contention in these targeted areas, and players had to start worrying about their opponents' plans and activities much earlier in the game.

Last night's playtest went very well. Everyone seemed to enjoy the game, and there was nothing that was clearly broken. But there is certainly room for improvement, and I happily received some good analysis and a number of excellent suggestions. My next steps are to extend some mountains here, reduce some cube counts there, and tweak the Major Lines some more. Then print the new map and run some more solo tests before taking taking it to Pacificon over Labor Day weekend for more live playtests.

The news is not all wonderful. Part of the motivation for Rottweiler is to add a couple of the innovative features from my Hammer and Spike game to this RotW expansion. One of those features is working well, but the other one is not throwing the same kind of sparks. I need to find some way to improve it. I'd like to have a better revision in time for Pacificon, if I can swing it.

Code Name Rottweiler!

2009-08-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

It's not much of a code name if everybody knows what it means, but I've taken to thinking of my expansion for RotW (the abbreviation of "Railways of the World") as "rottweiler". This comes purely from the letters; for the record, I see no particular parallels between the dog breed (or any dog breed!) and the game system. And I wouldn't have bothered mentioning it here, but I couldn't resist the hyper-dramatic "Code Name Rottweiler!" title for the post. Sounds like a bad spy movie!

I should make up for the preceding blather with some meaningful news, so here's the current status of... Code Name Rottweiler! (Okay, I'll stop now, I promise.)

I have a first cut at the map nearly complete. I just need to add starting cube counts to the towns and cities, and make sure it will print okay in black and white. (Why? See below.)

I have a first cut at the Railroad Ops cards designed. I still need to make the deck, either by laying out some mocked-up cards on the computer and printing them out, or by just scribbling on paper. Either way, I'll stick the EUS deck into card sleeves, then slip in the paper cards over the real ones. I've also finished the first cut at the Rail Baron cards. I have a good selection of Barons and (I hope) a good set of bonuses.

I'll need to tune a VP/income track for the game, but I can start with the one from the main game. I can use the modular scoring track boards that Helen made for our copy of the original Railroad Tycoon until I decide what tweaks I want to make. (If you play RRT on the big board and hate that scoring track, you can download Helen's modular scoring track from BoardGameGeek. Be sure to give her a thumb if you like it!)

Acting on a tip from an experienced developer, I discovered that I can print out a full-size board on a single sheet of paper at Kinko's, for just $0.75 per square foot! That comes to all of $6 for one copy, which is dirt cheap. I'd always looked at the color prices which are significantly higher, and I had never realized that black and white is so inexpensive. A RotW board doesn't need much color; what little it needs can be added in five minutes with a set of felt pens.

The bottom line: I plan to print my first board tomorrow and be doing my first solo playtests this weekend! That's an exciting thought.

J.C.'s "On Drowning in Games"

2009-08-03T21:54:00.000-07:00

In case any of the gamers who read this blog don't also read J. C. Lawrence's blog, here's a post of his that I particularly liked: On Drowning in Games.

Getting Rolling

2009-07-28T23:20:00.000-07:00

It's been three weeks since my last post. The major reason for this is that I've been asked not to be too forthcoming with details about the Railways of the World expansion I'm working on. This has put a crimp in my blogging style.

But I suppose I can get away with some generalities. For one thing, I was mistaken in thinking that the expansion would be mostly designed by others; turns out it's mainly in my lap. The board, the cards, the variant rules, all of it. I'll have help and advice from the publisher's developers, of course.

This is not how I foresaw my first publication contract! I thought I'd design a game, get it mostly finished, then get it licensed. After that, just playtest and tweak until the publisher is happy; the rest would be the publisher's problem. I didn't expect to have much left to do at this point. Instead I have to start almost from scratch!

Okay, it's not really "from scratch." The RotW system is well-defined and so are the Hammer and Spike features that I will be adding in; I'm not inventing a whole new game. But I still have to draw the map, define the cards, tune a scoring track (the scoring track in RRT/RotW is also the income track, so it affects the whole game economy), and fine-tune the H&S features (which, after all, were not originally designed for RotW). That's a lot to do. Fortunately I think it will be tremendous fun, and I've definitely been enjoying the process so far.

I've been told what part of the world the map must cover. Given that, I've been studying the history of the region, to see how the railroads grew there and what special conditions obtained. RotW is not a simulation game, so most of the historical detail is pretty useless; but I've gotten some ideas for the cards, and some notions on how to lay out the map (for example, the towns that were important to the railroads back then aren't always the ones that are largest or most important now). In fact I have more ideas than I'm going to be able to use. That's a good thing: it's better to have too much than to not have enough!

I've also been asked to try to make the H&S features into an optional variant that can be used with any RotW map, if you've got the rules and bits from my expansion. I've been testing that out on the Europe map, and I'm pleased to say that I think they will work.

Working on the board is going to be interesting. I've never made a prototype board this big before, and my usual cheap-and-dirty technique of printing it out on 8.5x11" sheets and taping them together may be too big a pain. I think this time I'm going to spend some money and have a print shop do it as a single big sheet, and then maybe have them laminate it so I can draw and erase on it easily. (No, it will not be as big as the original gargantuan RRT board. But it's not small either.)

Finally, and just to head off the questions: no, I don't know when it will be released. I just started working on it a couple of weeks ago! All I can tell you is that it will be a good long while, so there's no point in being impatient.

But yes, when I have it sufficiently developed, some of you will be able to playtest it. In fact, I'm counting on it!

Publishing Update

2009-07-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Spatial Delivery

The publisher who has been reviewing Spatial Delivery has (after a year!) finally tested it, and tells me that they are currently looking for lighter games. They haven't quite said "get lost" and the prototype will be tested further at their main office, but the news is not encouraging.

I have contacts at a couple of other publishers who may be interested in Spatial Delivery. My home and life are going to be in some disarray over the next few weeks (we are remodeling) but after that, and if the current publisher hasn't changed their mind, I will build yet another prototype and see if I can get someone else to look at it.

Hammer and Spike

This one got licensed! It's not quite what I had envisioned, because it will not be published as a stand-alone game the way I designed it. Instead, some of its unique features will be folded into a game already being designed by some of the publisher's other developers. But I am not too disappointed: the license is the same as it would have been for a stand-alone game; my name (among others) will be on the box; and the combined product sounds very exciting. I am sure I will someday see a game of my own published, and this is a good first step in that direction.

~~By the publisher's request, I am giving no details about the combined product for now. I'll post more information when I can.~~

Update to the update: I can now speak a bit more freely. Hammer and Spike will become a new expansion for the Railways of the World (RotW) game system. RotW is the new (and re-named) edition of Railroad Tycoon being published by FRED Distribution. I've been asked to design an expansion that will merge the unique features from Hammer and Spike with the familiar RotW system. If you've been following this blog, you know that Railroad Tycoon is my favorite game, so you can imagine how excited I am to be given this project!

JavaFX: Looking even better

2009-06-21T20:23:00.001-07:00

I was surprised to get a quick response to my forum post, on a Sunday afternoon yet. The response contained a solution for my unresponsive-objects problem (see below), and almost completely fixed it. I've seen the symptom recur now just once or twice in a 90-minute session, and it never persisted for more than a minute. I suspect that these remaining minor glitches have a different cause, and quite possibly are just due to my system being busy doing something else for a moment.

My virtual gameboard is now actually usable, and I played a complete game of Hammer and Spike with it in just 90 minutes. I am very pleased.

I still have more work to do: adding features, cleaning up minor bugs, and finishing the documentation. But one of these days, hopefully soon, I will make it available for others to use.

JavaFX: Looking better, but...

2009-06-21T16:13:00.001-07:00

I took vacation last week, and spent some of it working on my JavaFX virtual gameboard app (still inadequately named "Placer"). I've resolved some of the problems that were worrying me at the time of my last post: the exceptions are gone, the design and code are cleaner, the feature set and UI of the app itself have improved. I've figured out how it can be deployed, too, although unhappily it must use Java Web Start and requires the user to have a fast Internet connection (at every launch! Why won't Sun give us a better option?).

But my biggest problem remains unsolved. Sometimes, some of the objects in the window (cubes, banks, other clickable or draggable things) simply stop responding to mouse clicks for a while. This is mystifying because of the apparent inconsistency of the behavior. For example other objects in the same window remain perfectly responsive and well-behaved while the frozen ones continue to ignore the mouse. And a frozen object will often spontaneously unfreeze later on; but the period during which it remains frozen can be anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes. I have circumstantial evidence suggesting that a frozen object is more likely to unfreeze soon if I drag some other (and obviously more responsive) object over the frozen one; but this certainly does not always work, so it may be coincidence.

Until this issue is cleared up, the app is not viable. When objects freeze up like that, the app becomes effectively unusable. (It's okay if objects freeze up when you don't want to manipulate them. But you only notice that they're frozen when you do want to manipulate them, which means that your game is stopped until you can unfreeze the things you need to move.)

I've joined Sun's developer network, and posted in their JavaFX forum about my problem. And now I have yet another thing to wait for. I'm spending a lot of time sitting by my virtual phone these days, waiting to hear from game publishers, CD makers, and now helpful JavaFX gurus. It's getting old.

JavaFX FTW?

2009-06-06T20:05:00.000-07:00

JavaFX is yet-another-scripting-language. It promises that you can quickly create Java applets and applications with fancy visual effects by writing simple little scripts instead of miserably complex Java code. Does it deliver?

I was sic'ed onto JavaFX at my day job, charged with whipping up some cool new UI mockups. I quickly became fascinated. You can accomplish a lot with a little, using JavaFX. But that's not enough; I need to find out whether it can create industrial-strength applications, and if so, whether the code is readable and maintainable, and whether the UI it produces runs quickly and is responsive to the user.

I won't go into my day-job's proprietary stuff here. But (just in order to learn, you understand) one of the first things I did was start building a virtual gameboard. It went so well and so quickly that I've kept working on the project at home on my own time.

What is a virtual gameboard? I wanted a tool to quickly prototype a new game idea on the computer, without having to spend time and money assembling physical pieces. I wanted to be able to play the game (by myself, as I always do with new game ideas), change the rules and pieces, then play again, with rapid turn-around time on the changes. I also wanted play to go at least as quick as it would with real materials. I called the tool "Placer" because it will let me place things on a virtual gameboard. (A lame name, but it doesn't need a better one at the moment.)

Placer lets you specify an image file for the gameboard, which it displays in a window. A tool-palette area is automatically provided to the left of the board. In the palette are templates: If you see a red cube in the palette, for example, you can click-and-drag on it. It will produce a copy of itself (another red cube) that gets dragged away under your mouse. You drop the copy (called a "token") anywhere you like on the board. The template stays put, in the palette, and can be used again and again to make more tokens. A template is therefore a sort of virtual, limitless pile of its particular kind of token.

Placer is configured from a text file, in which you can specify a wide variety of templates for the palette: squares and rectangles, circles and ovals, cubes, disks, and more. Each one can be given a color, so you can have (say) four templates for the cube supply of four different players: one template each in red, yellow, green, and blue.

Tokens on the board can be moved around as much as you like. They can also be rotated, and each has a little popup menu that lets you delete the token or get a little information about it.

There are a couple of fancier kinds of tokens. One is the Bank, which displays an amount of money. Click on it to make a withdrawal: a small text box appears, you type in the amount to withdraw, and the Bank creates a new Cash token under your mouse. The Cash token displays the amount of money that you withdrew, and you can drag the Cash off to wherever you want it to go. The Bank stays behind, now displaying the balance that remains after your withdrawal. If a game uses money, you can create a master bank for the game, and then give each player a bank of their own. When you drop a Cash token onto a Bank, the Cash disappears and its value is added to the Bank's balance, making it easy to transfer money among the players. (The image shows a $13 bill ready to be dropped onto the Red player's bank, which currently contains $42.)

So has it been all kittens and rainbows? Nope, it hasn't. As is always the case with Java or anything Java-related, layout (that is, getting everything to be in the right place) is a major pain. JavaFX features coordinate-system manipulations that you must use to get anything significant done; no doubt they are very powerful and carefully thought out, but it gets very difficult to keep it all straight in your head (and your code) when you're writing something complex. Event handling is a bit tricky, and seems not always to work as advertised: sometimes my tokens simply ignore clicks and drags, with no clue as to why. (I suspect the garbage collector, at the moment.) And then sometimes JavaFX just throws a huge exception, stopping my app cold. It seems to be because I've coded something wrong, but I don't (yet) understand why I can play half a game of Hammer and Spike before it suddenly decides it doesn't like me.

Another issue is deployment. Suppose I finish up Placer, and want you to use it: how do I give it to you, and how do you install it? JavaFX isn't really designed for building stand-alone apps. You're supposed to access JavaFX programs via the Internet: as browser applets, or mobile device apps. It does provide a way to use WebStart files to deliver a desktop app, but these may have Java sandbox problems, which would be a killer for Placer: it has to be able to read your config file and board art.

But we'll see. I'm not done playing with it yet!

My Designs at KublaCon 2009

2009-05-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

Hammer and Spike suffered a setback recently, when we found a strategy that was successful, simple, and dead boring to play. To fix it I've adjusted the scoring. The bad news is that the scoring is now even more complex, but the good news is that the fix seems to be working. I hosted a four-player game at KublaCon that included a couple of new players and a couple of experienced train gamers, and I liked the way it played out. The winner was JC Lawrence, who also pointed out a problem I hadn't seen before (but which will be easily fixed, I think) and who gave some good feedback and advice.

And there is finally some news about the fate of Spatial Delivery. In our last episode (and the one before that, and the one before that...), the prototype had been sent off to a publisher shortly after winning the KublaCon game design contest in 2008. There followed nearly a full year of dead silence. I restrained myself from attempting to contact the publisher, reasoning that publishers were busy, they'd get to it when they had a chance, and there was no point in making a pest of myself. But this weekend I spoke to a company rep and learned that they'd recently had to fire a clerical worker for incompetence. This worker had made any number of bad-for-business mistakes, and one of them was losing my prototype (along with my contact info, of course). Fortunately the rep I spoke to was the very person who should have received the prototype in the first place. I had just built a new copy and had it with me hoping to play it, but instead I gave it to the rep. He told me it would be played next weekend and that I would hear something back within just a few weeks. So Spatial Delivery is back on track!

Now I just have to hope that the publisher actually likes it. But if they don't, I have a backup opportunity. The KublaCon contest director tells me that she has been talking the game up to a second publisher. I'm going to stick with the first until they make up their minds (at least, if it doesn't take another year for them to do so), but I would be perfectly happy to go with the second publisher if things fall out that way.

The lesson learned is obvious: keep in touch. I still think it's a bad idea to be a pest, but from now on any such publisher who hasn't contacted me within the last three months will hear from me. I don't intend to lose an entire year again.

And now I have two designs being actively evaluated by two publishers, and backup publishers for both. Cross your fingers for me! I'm hoping to have at least one game on its way to market, maybe two, by next year's KublaCon.

KublaCon 2009

2009-05-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

Whew! We're back from KublaCon, four days of delightfully intense boardgaming. And we're tired. (And my wallet is huddled in a corner, curled into a fetal position and sobbing.)

The high spots included scoring an inexpensive copy of Santa Fe Rails at the flea market, attending the game design contest awards, and playing two games designed by friends: Dylan Kirk's Genji, and JC Lawrence's Corner Lot. I also enjoyed a three-player game of Silverton (only the second time, I believe, that I've beaten Helen fair and square) and our first five-player game of Union Pacific, which confirmed our opinion that it is a great game.

Genji is a game about competitively wooing Japanese princesses by writing beautiful poems. I purchased it because I know the author (via Web) and, well, because it was cheap. Now that I've played it, I consider it a great bargain, because it's delightful. We're looking forward to more plays. The designer also did the artwork, which is thoroughly Japanese in style and theme and very lovely. It's almost worth owning the game just because it's so pretty. Unfortunately the publisher had some production problems and we had to ask for a replacement copy. One was given to us instantly, and we're happy now; but I hope the game gets republished soon with better quality.

Corner Lot has not yet been published, but if JC pursues it, I think it will happen before long. It's a card game with a theme of acquiring and developing real estate. The goal is to finish with the most money, which you accomplish by collecting sets of cards. The heart of the game is the unusual auction process by which you acquire the cards, and the tight budgeting that JC has carefully designed in. I liked it a lot.

I attend the game design contest every year, even though I don't always enter a design of my own. (I didn't enter this year, partly because I won last year, and partly because my current design is already being evaluated by a publisher.) But two games designed by friends were entered: the aforementioned Corner Lot, and Candy Weber's Coronets.

Both games fared well. The contest director was full of praise for Coronets, saying that she always looked forward to Candy's designs and that this was the best yet. They had a couple of nits to pick (no game gets away without a few nits being picked) but they found nothing wrong with the game that couldn't be fixed, and even the couple of things they recommended changing are not necessarily wrong. Corner Lot was judged to be "Knizia-like" (which is a compliment) and publishable, needing only a good player aid.

The winner was an abstract two-player game called "Kiva" with a really innovative idea. Its only real flaw seemed to be that the innovative idea makes it very expensive to publish, so finding a publisher willing to take it on will be difficult. I'm not going to specify the innovative idea because I don't know if the designer wants it broadcast on the Internet. But it looked very cool, and I'd like to try it myself.

The next post will include a bit of news about the progress of my own designs.

Recording Artist

2009-05-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I mentioned that I was gearing up to record a CD with Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band. After a week of home practice, three-hour rehearsals, and four-hour recording sessions, we "recording artists" are done with our part. I was tempted to say "finally done" because it feels to me as if it was a long haul, but really it was just that one tiring and overwhelming week.

And now all my friends are asking "when can I hear the CD?" and the answer is, "I don't know." The actual recording is finished, but much editing remains to be done before the disks can be printed. The editing is being done by the recording engineer, the bandleader, and at least two other members of the band who want a vote on which bits are used and which are tossed. I asked how long it would take and was unsurprisingly told "as long as it takes." So now I'm twiddling my thumbs and wondering if I'll have to wait a couple of weeks, a couple of months, or a couple of years. I'm guessing that the right answer will include the word "months".

I'm not sure I can honestly say it was "fun". I found it a bit too stressful to be considered "fun". There were some really good musicians in the group, and I was nervous and anxious. I just wanted not to screw up too badly in front of them, and especially not in front of the microphones which were pitilessly waiting to enshrine my every mistake for eternity.

But I think I got away with it. Fortunately my every mistake will not be enshrined, because of course we recorded at least two takes of nearly every tune. Any parts that gave us trouble were recorded multiple times, and part of the editing process is splicing together the good bits. There were a few solos I wish I could have done better, where even my best take was none too good. But that seemed to be true for everyone in the band, so I'm trying not to let my neurotic perfectionism get the better of me.

There were two tunes in particular that I was worried about. One was called "King of the Zulus". I'm very familiar with this piece, but it is a difficult one for the cornets. Playing second cornet, I can usually kind of hide down in the ensemble, and if I fumble a bit, people mostly won't notice. But in King of the Zulus there's no place to hide. Each cornet gets a full solo chorus, and both of them should be played hot and high. And my solo is immediately followed by another hot, high chorus in which the lead and second parts are swapped, so I'm playing melody for that time. It's a chop-grinder, and I wasn't sure I could play it twice in a row, so I was relieved when everyone agreed that the first take was a keeper and we didn't need to do it again!

The other piece didn't worry me at all until we got to it. It was late in the evening, Leon Oakley (the lead cornetist) was justifiably tired, and he asked me to take lead on "Chimes Blues". Fortunately for me it's not a difficult piece and it's one I know very well, but I was startled to suddenly be playing lead. We did two takes, and since I was tired too, I didn't play as well the second time through. But I was pleased with my solo on the first take, and I assume (and hope!) they'll use that one for the CD.

That was the only piece in which I played lead throughout; the rest of the time I played second, with an occasional chorus or half-chorus of lead because (I guess) the arranger wanted to give the lead a break. I just want to take a paragraph to say that this is a good thing, because the lead cornetist was Leon Oakley. I don't know of a better living trad jazz cornetist. Leon's chops are great and his musicianship is outstanding. He plays with a power, an authority, and a presence that are simply overwhelming, especially when heard live. I've been admiring (and trying to imitate) Leon's playing for 40 years, and it was a great privilege being asked to record with him. Stress notwithstanding, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Okay. Back to waiting for the CD!

Fires and Recordings and In-laws

2009-05-10T10:19:00.001-07:00

I've felt all this past week as if I should be blogging, but I've been too busy and too distracted. The Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara has occupied much of my attention. The fire not only devastated the foothills, but threatened the town itself. The neighborhood where I grew up was within a mile or or of the fire's perimeter and was under mandatory evacuation for a while; some friends of mine were also prepared to evacuate. I am saddened by the damage to the Botanical Garden, which was one of my favorite places; but it wasn't completely destroyed and I hope the damaged areas will be rebuilt and replanted. The fire is still in progress and is less than 50% contained, but the threat now seems to have lessened and the fire has moved north and west rather than south towards the town and suburbs, so things are looking up.

The in-laws paid us a visit on Friday and Saturday. I'm always happy to see them, and this brief visit was in part to deliver a car we bought from them for our son to use at college next year. We had a couple of nice dinners, some good conversation, and some excellent games with Joan. Although I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and wished the visit could have come either last weekend or next, it all worked out. I even found time to practice.

Why practice? Because on Monday and Tuesday, I'll be recording with Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band. For most of the group, this is a "ho-hum, another recording" event, but for me it's a very big deal. I have recorded before, but never in such professional surroundings; and I have only rarely been privileged to play with such a fine group of musicians. I definitely feel like the junior member of the group (my actual age notwithstanding) and am mostly hoping not to embarrass myself. Fortunately for all concerned I'll be playing second cornet, and for good or ill my efforts won't be too prominent. This, along with the fire, has been the main thing on my mind all week. I've been working hard on it, both at rehearsals and at home.

On the game design front there is little news. I now have two designs in the hands of publishers, and I'm back in the "hurry up and wait" mode. I have nearly completed the Spatial Delivery prototype (still have to paint the spaceships) that I'm building just to have handy, and I finally got off the dime and sent Seth his promised copy of Hammer and Spike. I'm looking forward to his group's feedback on that one.

And that's all for now. I gotta go practice!

A Word About Tasty Minstrel

2009-05-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

My friend Seth Jaffee has joined his friend Michael Mindes to create a new boardgame publisher, Tasty Minstrel Games. I think they will bear watching.

It may seem injudicious to start a new business venture in the current economic climate. But this may be a very good time to do it, because in contradiction to most of the rest of the economy, sales of boardgames are rising.

Veteran gamers are not surprised. We know that to take a family of four to the movies, you will spend $40 on tickets, plus $10 to $20 on munchies, plus whatever it costs to flog the family car to the theatre and back. In return for your $60 investment, you get the hassle of driving, the joy of parking, and the giddy fun of standing in line (sometimes two lines, one after the other). You do all this in order to sit in the dark and be silent for two hours. And when you're done, you're done.

Or you can spend the same amount of cash on a boardgame (sometimes two), and spend an hour or two of quality time with your friends and family, having face-to-face fun and actually talking to each other. And when you're done, you put the game on a shelf... and next week you can get it down and have all that fun all over again, and this time it doesn't cost you an extra cent.

So I think Tasty Minstrel has a shot, just from that. But obviously they'll need some good products, and here again I think the signs are hopeful. They'll be starting with a good strong design, Seth's Terra Prime, and with another game I haven't played but which I'm eager to try: Homesteaders. Tasty Minstrel has engaged Josh Cappel to do the graphic design for Terra Prime; his work is always excellent. (If I'm a very good boy, maybe he can do the art for a game of mine someday!) Homesteaders is being handled by another artist of my acquaintance; having not seen his name in print in connection with Homesteaders I'm not sure if I should name him here. But I've seen some of the artwork, and it's good stuff.

Obviously I'm biased here. Seth is a good friend and I wish him well; and I have a nodding Internet acquaintance with the two graphic designers as well. You folks out there in Readerland are welcome to wait until you read a review or two before deciding whether to invest your movie money in a Tasty Minstrel game. But I've already played Terra Prime, and followed some of the development of Homesteaders. I am entirely ready to give the latest X-Men epic a miss, and I will be in line to purchase copies of both games as soon as they're available.

Progress Report: Not Much

2009-05-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I'd issue a brief update, to wit: not much news here. After the excitement of GameStorm and the rush to get a copy of Hammer and Spike off to certain interested parties, little has happened. I've made two new copies (one for me, one for Seth), but haven't had much time to actually play or work with the game.

I've also been building a new copy of Spatial Delivery. I haven't had one since I sent my last copy to a publisher, last June. Having heard nothing since then, I figure it's time to give it some attention. I have no immediate plans for it except to start playing it again, but I should at least have a copy of my own, yes?

Hammer and Spike did get another playtest today, at the Los Altos Games Day. The day was great fun, as always. Helen and I particularly enjoyed a session of Age of Empires III, an excellent game that we've neglected for too long. I finished the day with the four-player H&S session, which seemed to go well on the whole. It did run kind of long, but perhaps that can be chalked up to having three newbies in the game. They all picked it up pretty well, and by the end were building fuel depots and switchyards and making the long deliveries like veterans. Two of them said they would happily play it again sometime, which is always nice to hear (although you have to make allowances; sometimes people are just being polite to the game designer who, after all, is standing right there). A couple of folks who stopped by to watch also expressed interest in playing the game, so I can hope to have more guinea pigs playtesters soon.

It was a good day!

Terra Prime at GameStorm

2009-04-08T18:12:00.001-07:00

Seth Jaffee brought a prototype of his game Terra Prime to GameStorm. Seth's been a real supporter and contributor to my own designs, and it's high time I said a word about one of his.

Terra Prime is a fun blend of the European and American styles of game design. (Those distinctions are really starting to blur these days.) In the game, Terra Prime is a station on the edge of explored space. Players are explorers who load their ships at Terra Prime with weapons, shields, and colonists, then head out into the unknown to establish colonies, placate or defeat hostile aliens, and bring goods back from the colonies to Terra Prime.

On the European side, Terra Prime has a nicely-done economic engine, where goods brought back can be exchanged for money, ship improvements, and Victory Points (VPs). Decisions about how best to spend your goods are a key part of the game.

On the American side, the game's mechanics are faithful to the theme, and include some fun dice-rolling and direct conflict (although the battles are against aliens provided by the game, rather than against your opponents).

There is no board per se; instead individual hex tiles are laid out in a spreading fan from the large Terra Prime tile. The hexes are face-down so that players initially can't see the hazards and opportunities on the tile faces; but the backs are color-coded so that the more dangerous (and lucrative) tiles are the farthest away. To see a tile's face, you must either visit its vicinity with your ship, or view it from a distance (costing an action but granting you an exclusive, secret peek).

The tiles plus the economic engine give the game a solid development arc. Players start with basic capabilities, and at first only need to cope with the easier neighborhood near Terra Prime. While the near neighborhood is explored and its potential realized, players improve their ships and become ready to head out to the dangerous, distant edge of space, where the real profits are.

I first played this game two years ago, at KublaCon 2007. Seth has been working on it steadily since then, and the game has acquired a lot of polish. It plays quickly, offering good depth in just 90 minutes or so. Players are given plenty to think about, and their decisions are important (as shown by the masterful way Seth trashed his opponents, including me, at GameStorm!), but the dice allow for push-your-luck opportunities for adventurous (or desperate) players.

Seth posted recently that Terra Prime will be published, and I'm delighted to hear it. I've been wanting a copy for two years, and now I can look forward to actually getting one!

GameStorm Photos

2009-04-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

Chris Brooks posted a great report on his experience at GameStorm 11, and published quite a few photos on Flickr. Someone let me know that the photos included a shot of one of the playtests of Hammer and Spike — that's me on the right.

GameStorm Fallout

2009-04-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

GameStorm was a lot of fun, but I haven't had a chance to relax or breathe until now. Although I brought along Hammer and Spike mainly to show it to Seth, it wound up attracting a good deal more attention than I expected, and some of it was industry attention. The upshot was that after driving 13 hours to get home yesterday, we spent most of today frantically assembling another copy to send to someone who had requested it, and who needed it this weekend. We just got that done and shipped about an hour ago. Another person has also requested a copy, but less urgently, so we'll be making and shipping another in the near future.

This is all very gratifying, and quite astonishing to me. I simply did not expect it, and wasn't prepared for it. It was Helen who saved the day. She invented an amazing new way to make certain prototype bits, and got up this morning and drove around town collecting supplies and packing materials; then returned home and sewed up a couple of drawstring bags (emerging victorious over a cranky sewing machine), reviewed and corrected the rulebook, and finally drove us to the shipping office, just in time. We literally watched them slapping the last stickers on while the UPS guy held the box for them. I could not possibly have done all this without her, and would not have dared to try.

So now it's hurry up and wait again, I guess, just like it's been with Spatial Delivery for the last eight or nine months. If anything comes of it, I'll let y'all know. In the meantime I have to make two more prototypes (one's for me, as I cannibalized some of my original) and get in a lot more playtesting... oh yeah, and I have to run off to a rehearsal tonight.

GameStorm 2009 at Halftime

2009-03-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

This weekend I'm at the GameStorm boardgame convention, ostensibly in Oregon but actually just over the border in Vancouver Washington. For me the high points so far have been seeing my in-laws (Joan is an avid gamer), gaming with my design buddy Seth Jaffee, and presenting Hammer and Spike.

GameStorm has a "GameLab" track for game designers and playtesters. I got an appointment to present Hammer and Spike to a panel of local game publishers, not so much in hopes of getting it published but in order to get feedback on the game and its presentation. It was a good session, maybe 20 to 30 minutes. I got good advice and answers to a few questions I had about the industry. (For example, I learned that the game duration shown on a game's box is for new players, not experienced ones! I didn't know that.) There wasn't time to play the game so the panel doesn't really know if a game is any good. But they were impressed with what they saw, which was very gratifying; and I got invited to bring Hammer and Spike to an invitation-only playtest session on Sunday (tomorrow, as I write this) for the best of the games they have reviewed this weekend.

I had one informal playtest yesterday with Seth, his friend Jeremy, Joan, and myself. It went well, but we all agreed that it went too long. I currently set the game at a constant 20 rounds, but the game was definitely "over" after 17 or 18 rounds. This is a point I've been dithering over, and I now think that 20 really is probably too many. I'm going to try 18 for a while: a bigger cut than it sounds like, since the last rounds are analysis-paralysis festivals and take way longer than earlier rounds. I still want a typical game to come in at 2 hours or less.

It's now Saturday morning, and I'm looking forward to playing some of Seth's designs: Terra Prime, Homesteaders, and/or Brain Freeze. I played Terra Prime two years ago and I'm eager to see the changes he's made since then. Homesteaders (designed by Alex Rockwell, but Seth helped with development) and Brain Freeze are games I haven't played yet, and I'm eager to see them.

I'll update this post with a few links later on, but right now it's time to gather our aggies and head for the con. Game on!

P.S. Saturday evening—I've added those links, and here's another: Seth's GameStorm reports.

Adventures in Prototyping

2009-03-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

My game design blogging has a split personality; much of it goes here, but some also goes up at the Board Game Designers Forum. This weekend I made a more durable board for the Nameless Rail Game, and chronicled the effort in some detail in my journal there. I felt that the content was of more interest to hard-core designers than to the more general crowd that reads this site, but if you're interested, follow the link.

I made the board because a flat, stiff, foldable board is a lot easier to transport than the taped-together big sheets of paper I've been making for home use. Helen and I are about to head up to Oregon to visit family and attend GameStorm, where I hope to get more playtesting done.

And the beast may finally have a name. The new board is labeled Hammer and Spike, which may not be great but is not in use by any other games. It will serve until and unless I hear a distinctly better suggestion. My thanks to all those who suggested alternate names, but I have to live with Helen and she didn't like some of them, so Hammer and Spike it is.

Picking Up Steam

2009-03-07T21:34:00.001-08:00

Two more live playtests, at the Los Altos Games Day! The game was well received, and I was quite pleased with the results.

The changes I made after last week's session worked well. Playtime came in at about two hours, and I suspect would be a bit shorter with experienced players. Players successfully built transcontinental networks and made coast-to-coast deliveries by the end of the game. A few switchyards were built in each game, but never all six. That all seemed just right.

On the down side, my long-standing worries that the scoring system is badly balanced were borne out. The reward for connecting all six cities is so high that a player who fails to do so is almost guaranteed to lose. This would be okay except that it's usually clear which players will fail by around halfway through the game. It's no fun being the goat in a game in which there is almost always one designated goat.

The way to fix that is probably to raise the VP reward for building switchyards. The trailing player has an advantage here, in a way: if he is flexible enough to give up on the six-city goal early enough, he will save several actions and a fair amount of cash. He can then devote those resources to switchyard building, and remain competitive with the six-city players.

I have also recently revised the simulator to play by the new rules, and run another couple hundred thousand simulations or so. These were, as before, mostly explorations of balance. It has become quite clear that an intelligent first player has a huge advantage over his opponents, because the choice of starting locations is not even remotely balanced. This isn't unusual for rail games. The simulations show that it can be balanced by giving the players differing amounts of starting cash. In the game rules, I expect I will express this in two ways: a "standard game" in which the starting cash is simply dictated by the rules, and an "advanced game" in which the players hold an initial auction for turn order. Players will use the standard rules until they feel qualified to judge fine differences in starting positions, and can then advance to the auction rules. (Unlike Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon, I don't think this game needs a turn-order auction every round. One at the start of the game should be sufficient, and the turn order need not change after that.)

Finally, I came away with a clear understanding about the current inadequacies of the board graphics and the player aids. This is not part of game design (since I have no plans to self-publish), but a well-made prototype really helps newbies concentrate on the game instead of on decoding the board and remembering the rules. I have some ideas for improvements, and I will be playing around in Photoshop to try to turn those ideas into clear graphics.

I Got Game

2009-02-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

Saturday the long-awaited live playtest of the nameless rail game finally happened, and I'm pleased to report that it went very well. My playtesters were Candy Weber, John Portley, Helen, and myself. (John and Candy brought designs of their own that we also tried, and those went well too. But I don't know if they want Internet coverage, so I'm just going to talk about mine for now.)

There was good news, and bad news. The good news was that all players agreed that the game presented interesting and difficult decisions; it wasn't just a matter of turning the crank. (I was worried about that.) The bad news was that it took over three and a half hours to play!

Everyone was very nice about the length of it, and pointed out that it was a learning game for everyone except me, and that we also stopped periodically to discuss the design. True, but I think those excuses only go so far. I don't want the game to last more than two hours. In my playtesting it usually takes only two hours. But you have to allow time for people to chat, and I also don't want a newbie's first experience to be a marathon. So I'm going to give some attention to speeding up play. This probably means reducing the number of rounds and tweaking things to allow players to get stuff done in fewer turns. I received some very good suggestions about how to accomplish that, and I intend to try them out. The best idea I heard was to change a couple of actions into non-actions, so that you can get a bit more done in your turn. I think that will not only speed things up, but also remove some of the major sources of player frustration that I observed.

Between those suggestions and a few tweaks of my own that I've been thinking about for a while, I have a laundry list of things to experiment with. But none of these items are major changes; they all amount to streamlining of one kind or another. I'll try them out in solo play over the next week or two, to see which ones help and which don't. In two weeks there's a Games Day, and I'll probably bring the latest version to that and see if I can get another live test. After that I can bring it to GameStorm in Portland at the end of March, and eventually KublaCon at the end of May. I can hope that by then it will be pretty stable.

Know the score!

2009-02-17T23:17:00.001-08:00

A game's scoring system is what motivates the players. It's the carrot that the designer dangles in front of the players, to entice them to go where he wants them to go. A large part of the work I've put into the nameless rail game has been tweaking the scoring system. I want players to build wide, continent-spanning networks, and use their networks to make long deliveries. I want them to compete with each other for the best routes and for connections to cities that not everyone will be able to reach. I want to inspire track-building races.

The scoring system has to reward this kind of behavior. But to be really good, it needs to do more. Jonathan Degann has written about the "big bomb" notion in scoring. A "big bomb" (put simply) is a high-scoring accomplishment that more than one player can strive for, but only one can achieve. Ideally the competition to claim the "bomb" involves some commitment from the competing players: the player who succeeds will see his investment pay off big, while the others will lose whatever they invested. This makes tension during the competition, and a big emotional pay-off when it's over: triumph or tragedy. Drama!

In the nameless rail game, I have been motivating players to build wide networks by designating six widely-separated junctions as cities (as opposed to mere towns). Players are rewarded with victory points for the number of cities in their network at the end of the game. Each additional city gives a bigger bonus than the previous. The first three or four cities are easy to get to, and the rewards are small. The fifth is harder, and gives a big slug of points. The sixth is hardest of all, and yields a really big slug of points. The board is laid out so that not every player can connect to every city, so the competition for fifth and especially sixth cities is fierce. This is one form of Degann's big bomb: for much of the game, players are racing to get to all six cities. Getting there first not only guarantees that you get the big reward, it also virtually guarantees that somebody else won't get there at all.

But I didn't want that to be the only way to get a big score, so I added another kind of bomb. This notion took me longer to come up with, and many iterations to refine. (I'm probably still not done with it.) It is the switchyard. Each of the six cities may have one switchyard built there. The player who builds it gets a big VP reward. This counts as a bomb because only one player can do it (per city), and because of the obstacles that must be overcome before the switchyard can be built.

First, you can't even start trying to build a switchyard until at least two players are connected to the target city. That guarantees competition. Second, you can't build a switchyard until you have made at least one delivery to that city of each of the four different kinds of good. Therein lies the race and much of the tension. Finally, after finishing the prerequisite deliveries, you need to come up with a big payment. Often two players will both finish the deliveries, and then it's a matter of who comes up with the cash first. The player who does will roughly double the value of his cash, while any who don't have wasted much of their effort.

I'd like to make that race more poignant if I can. There's more tension if the players have to invest something real in order to compete for the bomb. Currently, the only real investment is that players may forgo more lucrative deliveries in favor of ones that fill their switchyard prerequisites. And maybe that's enough. But I am considering making the players pay a piece of the switchyard cost up front, every time they "record" a delivery. The total cost of the switchyard is still the same, but you would have to pay some of it just to try to build the switchyard; and if you fail, you won't get any refunds.

What worries me about this notion is that it may become a disincentive: the potential loss may frighten players away from trying to compete for switchyards. If so I might try to lead them into the commitment gently: charge only a little for the first delivery, so it feels safe. But now the player is invested and wants to protect the investment, so if someone starts to compete he may be willing to pay a little more to keep up, and so on. I dunno, I'll have to try it and see how it goes!

How many players?

2009-02-11T22:17:00.000-08:00

I have a habit of designing my multi-player games for a "sweet spot" of four players, and then testing and tweaking to see whether they will also gracefully support more or fewer players. While I don't recall this being a conscious decision, it makes sense to me. Four is a nice, balanced number: two couples, or a family with two kids. It can mitigate the excessive downtime that some games suffer with more players, and avoids the two-against-one dynamic that can ruin a lot of three-player experiences.

But I don't want to design exclusively for four. Any game will sell better if it can be labeled for "3 to 5" or "2 to 6" players. And any game will be more popular if it actually works for the given range. (All experienced gamers have seen games that really don't play well at the low or high end of the claimed range.)

So recently I broke from my usual simulated four-player rail game sessions, and tried a five- and a three- player to see what would happen. I'm pleased to say that the game survived, and seemed playable. But unsurprisingly the game gives a different experience with different numbers of players.

With four, I've tried to tune things so that the winning player will likely connect all six cities, and build a switchyard: the two highest-scoring achievements. Usually two of the remaining players will get one or the other goal, but not both; and one player will get neither. This makes for vigorous competition to link up the cities, which is one of my design goals. It also often results that most players have little money left at the end of the game: although money is also worth victory points, you're usually better off spending it on connectivity or switchyards if you can. The losing player may actually finish with the most money, having been unable to spend as much of his income on connectivity and switchyards as the others; but sometimes such a player prospers so well just making deliveries that his cash hoard pulls his score up into the middle of the pack.

In the three-player game, there was much more elbow room. All players were able to connect all cities, which soaked up more time and money than in the usual 4p game. It was a less competitive, more open game. I found that I prefer the four-player experience, but some players may enjoy the easier, free-wheeling nature of the 3p game.

In the 5p game, the board was crowded and tight, and competition for connectivity was fierce. Only one player connected all six cities. Also the board filled with track rather faster than in the 4p game, so players could tell early on when (for example) it was clearly impossible for them to reach New York or Seattle. That meant more concentration on switchyards: five were built, and one player built two. This game ended with a lot of money in circulation, because more players were simply making deliveries in the late game rather than building.

Unsurprisingly, the game seems to have a different character depending on the number of players. With three, it's relatively open and easy-going. With four, competition is tight but most players are going to be able to do well. With five, money is tight in the early game as players race for connectivity, then piles up in the late game as players concentrate on lucrative deliveries.

J. C. Lawrence says a game should end when the winner is clear. I think he's right, so I was watching these games to see whether they ended too soon or too late. In the 4p game, 20 rounds seems exactly right. (I originally had a variable end-of-game trigger based on running out of goods, but decided it didn't work well.) I'm prepared to alter the 20-round figure for the 3p or 5p games, but so far it seems to hold up. The 5p game, for example, might have ended at 17 rounds; but then some serious new delivering and building took place in round 20, enough to convince me that the final three rounds weren't empty activity.

Another way to balance the game for different player counts is to alter the map. A smaller map for a 3p (or 2p) game, a larger one for 5 or 6. I haven't gone there yet, but of course I have the possibility in mind. Completely different maps is one way to do it, but it might also work to vary the main map by adding or removing junctions and connections. But before I go there, I want to shake down the current design some more. When (if!) I'm really comfortable with the 4p game, I'll look harder at variations to improve the experience with other player counts.

Rails: Ready to Roll?

2009-02-02T22:11:00.000-08:00

This weekend I put in some more hours on the rail game (now code-named "Iron Horse With No Name" until I settle on a new title). I'm pretty pleased with the results.

It continues to surprise me how much difference a small rule tweak can make sometimes. I recently introduced the notion that deliveries can only go so far without "refueling." You refuel at Stations, which hold Fuel cubes. Each time you refuel, you consume a Fuel cube and your delivery is able to continue for up to another three towns. With multiple refuelings, very long (and very profitable) deliveries can be made. Refueling from your own Station is free; to use someone else's Station, you pay them $2 (equal to a little less than half a Victory Point). When a Station is emptied of Fuel cubes you can pay to refill it.

But a solo playtest with this mechanism produced a game that moved too slowly, and that bogged down at the end. There was not enough incentive to build Stations—every player wanted to wait for the other players to build them—so the long, high-paying deliveries could not be made.

I reworked the costs and benefits to make Stations more attractive, but then I started to worry: maybe the Fuel cubes were unnecessary mechanism. Why not get rid of them and simply always allow refueling at every Station? So I tried that next, and it almost worked. I got the wide networks and long deliveries I wanted. But the players' decisions were not challenging enough. Stations with exhaustible fuel added complexity and interest to those decisions.

So I tried again, putting Fuel back in the game but with the new costs and benefits I'd worked out. And that, thankfully, seems to work. The latest solo playtest had interesting and challenging decisions, players were able to build the big networks and reap the big profits I was after, and the game never bogged down.

Well... I think the decisions were interesting and challenging. I find that very hard to gauge when all the players are me. But I believe it's finally time for some live playtests. (Huzzah!) So I'm going to spend the next week or so re-drawing the board and creating some good player aids, and then I'll start bringing it to local game days and nights and see what other folks think of it.

Concerning Rail Games

2009-01-24T20:27:00.001-08:00

I've made more progress on "The-Rail-Game-Formerly-Known-As-Rails-Across-America". The biggest problem I've had with it lately is just that it seems uninspired overall, and perhaps doesn't offer enough interesting or difficult choices to the players. Recently a friend made an encouraging comment, and that gave me some new ideas, and the latest iteration is looking better. It's still a live design.

But it set me to thinking. How interesting, and how difficult, do the choices have to be in order to have a fun and playable game? I tried a wargame design once; it was judged by the KublaCon playtesters to be boring because the decisions were obvious and easy to make. I don't want to repeat that mistake. On the other hand, while it's good to have ambitious goals, as a fledgling designer I can't expect to design the next #1 game at BoardGameGeek. So how good is "good enough"?

For an answer I am looking at my own favorites among the published rail games. These are:

* Ticket to Ride
* The crayon rail games (Empire Builder and its sequels)
* Railroad Tycoon
* Age of Steam
* The 18XX games
* Silverton

What kind of game experience do these successful games offer?

Ticket to Ride has simple rules and simple play, and is over in an hour. At times you spend move after move simply drafting cards into your hand. Your decisions are mostly of the push-your-luck variety: should you grab that route now, before someone else does? Or wait until you can grab several connected routes in quick succession, so as not to tip your hand too soon? The fun comes mainly from the tension of that basic decision. And it is fun, without a doubt. The Ticket to Ride series is far and away the most commercially-successful rail game ever. So we learn this: Tension lends interest and excitement.

Empire Builder and its sequels are straight-forward games of building track and making deliveries. These are flawed games, in my opinion. They take too long to play, especially if you make the mistake of playing with more than four players. There is little player interaction: you don't have to worry very much about what your opponents are doing. And the decisions are simple: which of my nine potential deliveries is the best to do next? Where should I built my next track? Is it time to upgrade my locomotive? The answers are usually fairly obvious, once you've done the gruntwork of figuring out sources and destinations for your potential deliveries (which usually is a lot of work: another flaw). And yet the crayon rail games are fun anyway, popular enough to have spawned a dozen or so sequels, and due to be re-issued this year by Mayfair. Lesson learned: A game can be fun even if its choices are not difficult. Sometimes the activity itself is entertainment enough.

Age of Steam is an amazingly good game, at least if you enjoy high levels of competition. Often described as "a knife fight in a phone booth", AoS crowds players together and forces them to compete viciously for routes and deliveries. A tight economic system makes budgeting a challenging and crucial exercise, and an auction system that controls both player order and access to important actions adds tremendous tension. Lesson learned: Holzgrafe, you will never design a rail game this good! More seriously: budgeting and pacing issues add interest to a game, and player interaction is important.

Railroad Tycoon is my favorite. This game has the same basic notion as Empire Builder (build rail, then make deliveries) but avoids the flaws in the crayon rail system. Spotting viable deliveries is easy and quick; the choices are interesting and difficult; and the game does not outlast its fun factor, even with six players. It has excellent player interaction, because players must compete for track routes, deliveries, and bonuses. It's really more appropriate to compare RRT with Age of Steam because it is directly derived from AoS. RRT is less competitive than AoS. But if Age of Steam is "a knife fight in a phone booth", Railroad Tycoon is still at least a barroom brawl: more spacious and forgiving of errors, but still highly contentious and with plenty of chairs and tables to swing. Lesson learned, from both AoS and RRT: Competition for scarce resources makes for tough, interesting choices.

The 18XX series adds a new element: a stock market. In an 18XX game players build rail and make deliveries. Players compete mainly to acquire stock, drive up the value of companies in which they are heavily invested, and sell high-valued stock to reap the gains and ruin the stock's value for others who still own shares. 18XX games are complex, long, and deeply strategic. I have played only once and I'm not competent to discuss them in detail, but there is a lesson learned: A volatile, interactive market adds a whole new level of interest to a game.

Silverton is the rail game that has most recently grabbed my attention, although it's now over 15 years old. Silverton features a volatile market, but it is a goods market rather than a stock market. Players compete not only to lay track, but to claim mines. Mines are worked to produce goods, which you then convert to money by delivering to market cities. Market prices vary, partly at random and partly influenced by recent sales. Taking a big load to market can drop market prices ruinously for anyone who shows up late. Silverton combines a fairly standard build-and-deliver mechanism with features such as the market, the high-risk nature of mining, and the difficulties of winter operations in the Rockies, resulting in a fascinating game with good levels of player interaction. Lesson learned: Volatility forces pacing, making players choose between urgent actions and important actions.

So what does this all imply for my own design? I'm still evaluating that, but I'm encouraged. My latest rules revision (with the compelling sobriquet of "Straw Man 6") adds complexity in a way that improves player interaction and gives players more to worry about. I think the game is now at least as interesting as a crayon rail game, because it has more interaction, more complex decisions to make, and more tension. But maybe not—maybe the decisions, for all their complexity, still have obvious solutions. I need to work with it some more to find out whether that's true.

And then there's this whole business about volatility. There isn't much, in the current design. I need to think about adding some, and I have a few ideas to play with. I'll keep y'all posted, and I may even post the latest rules sometime soon.

Context Switch

2009-01-12T20:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of friends recently asked if I'm playing much music lately, and why haven't I been talking about fencing?

I haven't been talking about fencing because I haven't been doing any. About a year and a half ago I pulled something in my right forearm—I didn't notice the moment when it happened, but I'd been fencing a couple of guys who liked to use a lot of muscle. You hold a fencing foil mostly with your thumb and forefinger, like a scalpel, but there's a limit to how much power you can put into a grip like that. I was using a french grip, which offers little purchase to the other fingers. One opponent was using a pistol grip, allowing greater strength; and the other was just holding his foil like a hammer. (He wasn't very good, just strong.) So something in my forearm, back near the elbow where the long stringy stuff is anchored, gave way. I've waited all this time for it to heal up, and it hasn't, not all the way. In November it was getting worse again, and I had to stop fencing. I'm now convinced that it won't heal on its own, so tomorrow I'll see my doctor and start the process of figuring out what's really wrong and how to fix it.

Oh, and I took two lessons away from that experience. The first: don't fight strength with strength. I shouldn't have been resisting all that muscle with my own. Instead I should make better use of leverage; resist only briefly and then release suddenly, so the opposing blade suddenly "flies away"; and on offense, try to avoid blade contact altogether. And the second: get a pistol grip.

As for music: no, I haven't been playing much. A while back I realized that my non-music schedule had become too unpredictable for regular gigs and rehearsals: too many sudden needs to stay late at work, or be at home for one reason or another. Needing to be in two or three places at once was causing a lot of stress, so I reluctantly resigned from my jazz band.

But I still play with them on special occasions, and sometimes "sub" with other bands. Yesterday was a very good day: I played with Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band. This is a two-cornet band in the tradition of King Oliver and Lu Watters. The band does not play a regular gig and does not really have standard personnel, but Ted has a short list of people to call when a gig is scheduled. They're all good, and some of them are really good. Yesterday they were all really good.

Fronting the band was Leon Oakley, an incredible cornetist who recorded with Turk Murphy, the South Frisco Jazz Band, and any number of other great bands. For my money Leon is the best living trad cornetist. He plays with tremendous power and vitality. I've played with Leon before, and it's always a challenge trying to keep up with him; I haven't always been proud of the results. But yesterday the stars all aligned, and the band put out a powerhouse performance, and I didn't do too badly myself. I was proud to have been part of the group, and immensely relieved that I didn't embarrass myself in the process. I received a number of compliments, from audience and band members both, about the two-cornet work. That was good to hear, because I was trying my best to blend well with Leon.

At the end of the day Ted was talking about getting the band, with exactly the same personnel, into a recording studio to cut an album. Talk's cheap and scheduling is difficult so I'm not holding my breath—but I hope it happens. I'd treasure a disc like that.

Our tuba player, Jim O'Briant, had recording equipment rolling during yesterday's session. He was worried that it might have been in vain, but I'm hoping it wasn't. That's another recording I'd love to have, even though the sound quality wouldn't be very good—you can only do so much with non-professional equipment in an echoing meeting hall. But I'm used to that sort of thing, and I'd dearly love to hear our performance. I was working so hard I missed a lot of it!

New Games

2009-01-02T18:32:00.000-08:00

Some of these were Christmas presents; several we purchased to console ourselves for being unable to visit (and game with) our relatives in Oregon while they were snowed in.

The Princes of Machu Picchu — Mac Gerdts's latest, and we are very taken with it. Strongly recommended!

Ice Flow — An interesting semi-abstract with nice bits. Might be a bit dry.

Set — A light, quick filler. Helen has wanted this for a long time.

EuroRails — We're fans of the crayon rail series, and already have Empire Builder and Iron Dragon.

Le Havre — Only played this once so far; we're looking forward to more plays. Lots of unique cards to become familiar with.

Stone Age — A straight-forward worker-placement game that's proved to be a lot of fun. Recommended as a mid-weight Euro.

TransAmerica — We liked TransEuropa when Helen's Mom brought it, so we got this for ourselves. Includes the "Vexation" expansion.

Galaxy Trucker — Looking forward to trying this, but having a little trouble with components.

Dominion — Everybody raves about this; I hope it lives up to the hype. (Do we really need 500 card sleeves for this game!?)*

Fresh Fish — A strange and interesting game about managing negative space.

Silverton — A heavy-duty, long-running rail game suitable for one (!) to six players. I'm eager to try this one.

* Postscript: It's now 11:30 pm. Yes, we did need 500 sleeves. I have just finished sleeving them all. I also spent a couple of hours this afternoon putting 200+ stickers onto little plastic poker chips for Silverton. Not as bad as the ~700 stickers for Commands and Colors: Ancients, but bad enough. Never let it be said that I won't suffer for my hobbies.

Black Christmas

2008-12-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

We had a pretty good Christmas (in spite of the title of this post) but it was not without its surprises and setbacks.

We had intended to travel to Oregon to spend the holiday with Helen's relatives, and to celebrate our nephew's fourth birthday. But our hosts, her parents, got snowed in. On the evening of the 22nd, we had to call off our anxious weather-watching and admit that nobody was going to gather in Oregon that week. (It is now Saturday after Christmas, and they're still trapped! They're safe, but likely won't get out until Monday or so.)

So we had two days to suddenly gear up for Christmas at home. A tiny turkey (store was sold out of the larger ones), mashed potatoes and gravy pre-made from Whole Foods (very good, too), salad fixings, Pillsbury crescent rolls (and cinnamon buns for breakfast), bottle of wine, and a mince pie made a very nice, small-scale feast. Helen had already spent a couple of days baking cookies: she has a half-dozen recipes that are all incredibly good, and she makes plenty every year.

We meant for dinner to be ready at 6, and we have no idea why that tiny turkey took so long to roast. It was 10pm before we sat down to eat! But it was very good (even without allowing for hunger as a sauce), and there was enough for everybody plus a little left over for a couple of sandwiches the next day.

The weather was odd. Periods of bright, calm sunshine alternated with the most amazing squalls, one of which took down a power line across the street. We weren't affected, but half of our neighbors had no power from about 9am Christmas morning until maybe 6pm the following evening. (They are the ones who had the "black Christmas"!)

We spent much of Christmas Day playing games (we had a lot of time while waiting for that turkey). We played Pandemic, Stone Age, and Ice Flow: all fairly new games for us. It was the first time in quite a while that the four of us had all played a game together, the kids now being grown enough to have their own social lives. It was a good day.

We have a number of new games in the house: unable to go to Oregon, we spent some of the traveling money on games to console ourselves. Le Havre and Siena we had already recently bought as Christmas presents for ourselves. We then went out and got Stone Age, Ice Flow, and Princes of Machu Pichu. And then Christmas is also Helen's birthday: I got her a copy of Galaxy Trucker, but it turned out her mother had gotten her that also! So we took the one I bought back to the store and traded it for EuroRails, TransAmerica, and Set. And we know there are more games coming, as soon as the relatives dig themselves out and can reach a post office. I think it's time to get that "Owner of Too Many Games" microbadge over at BoardGameGeek.

Stone Age looks like a hit. Ice Flow is interesting, but may be a bit dry, or else just sensitive to the number of players. We've played Princes of Machu Picchu just once so far, two-player, but we liked it. It's by the designer of two of our other favorite games, Antike and Imperial, so we had high hopes and it looks like we won't be disappointed. I want to play it again, soon. (And I want to get Brass back on the table, too!)

Not much game design news from me, but I have had a couple of ideas for spicing up the rail-game-formerly-known-as-Rails-Across-America. I hope to work with it some today, and I'll let y'all know how it comes out.

I hope you've all had good holidays too, and we can all hope for a Happy New Year.

All the Good Names Are Taken

2008-12-21T12:44:00.000-08:00

Stumbled across a reference today, and discovered that there's a PC game named Rails Across America. Oh, well—my design will probably never be published anyway. But it's frustratingly difficult to come up with a good name for a rail game these days. Even Martin Wallace's latest has a poor name: Steel Driver (with its picture of John Henry on the box) would be a great name if the game were primarily about building rail. But it isn't; it's primarily about buying stock in railroad companies, an activity that I suspect the Steel-Drivin' Man never indulged in.

Anyway, if you're a copyright lawyer you can stand down. I'll find something else to call my design.

The Blahs

2008-12-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat..."

That would be me, that goose. About a year and a half ago I strained something in my wrist and had to lay off fencing for a few months. Then it got better (or so I thought) and I returned; but a month or so ago it was getting bad again. Now I'm again not fencing—and at Christmas, when there's far too much tempting, fattening food available. So far I haven't gained more than a couple of pounds. My wrist is feeling better and I hope to return to fencing in January.

An old friend of mine just got laid off from a job he'd held for well over a decade. That's not news in this economic climate, but it's depressing. Fortunately he got a good severance package and a lot of notice. He may need both; I have other friends who've been out of work for years.

Other "blah" non-news: no advances on any of my game designs. Somehow inspiration hasn't been striking. Had to work about ten days of intensive overtime, finishing up last week: fortunately it was not in vain, and we met the deadline. Really not much new, and really I'm writing this entry just to show that I haven't given up on the blog.

I have had a minor revelation (not an especially helpful one, alas) about my Rails Across America design, which has been languishing because I don't find it very original. It's that even my starting notion of a rail game that focusses on junctions as much as connections is not very original. I just wasn't remembering a number of games with that mechanic. One of them, embarrassingly, was my own Spatial Delivery. Another is Martin Wallace's excellent Brass. I played this game last May and enjoyed it, and Helen and I now have our own copy (after waiting months for a pre-order of the second edition). I can't recommend Brass enough, at least for experienced gamers. It's a tightly competitive game of linking towns and cities in Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution, and although the canal and rail links themselves are worth victory points, you get most of your score from building industries in the towns (using the links to transport building materials, and later products) and making them pay off.

Brass is great fun, but the rules are not trivial and are filled with difficult-to-remember exceptions. The second edition's rulebook was re-written and is apparently much improved over the original; but the rules themselves are still somewhat baroque. It's hard to play the game correctly the first couple of times. But if you stick with it, it's a great game. Helen and I were pleased to find a two-player variant on BoardGameGeek that some fan of the game designed. It works quite well. There are other two-player variants that we haven't tried, as well.

Finishing on an up beat: it turns out that idle blogging is not completely useless. Just talking here about Brass and Rails Across America gave me a new idea to spice up my design. Something to think about over the holidays!

The Invisible Man

2008-11-28T20:21:00.001-08:00

"Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man — as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes — no doubt it's startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways — scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them." — H. G. Wells

About three years ago, I had an idea to make a game based on H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man. In the novel, a scientist discovers how to make himself invisible, then goes on a mad rampage. (I'm oversimplifying here—the novel is not a mere hackneyed mad-scientist tale. If you haven't read it, you should!) My idea was to have the players cooperate in trying to defeat the Invisible Man, while the Invisible Man attempted to complete his Reign of Terror. I came up with a nifty mechanism whereby the Invisible Man could be a non-player character, moving around a map according to a set of rules, in such a way that the players would not always know exactly where he was.

And there it stalled for some time. The problem is that I don't much care for cooperative games, yet the theme seemed to demand cooperation. What could the players possibly be competing for in the face of such a fearsome common threat? A week or two ago I finally got an inspiration. The Invisible Man had a treasure: his scientific journals detailing the invisibility process. A competitive game would involve the players cooperating to defeat the Invisible Man, but competing to find clues to the place where he has hidden his journals. If the Invisible Man wins, all players lose. If he is defeated, the player with the most clues wins the journals and the game.

The novel is old enough to be in the public domain, so there would be no need to license the title and characters, and no problem including quotes for flavor. I think it would be a fun theme, but I've got a lot of work still to do to build a good game around it.

"This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me — the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch, — the Epoch of the Invisible Man."

A Question of Balance

2008-11-25T23:47:00.000-08:00

"Is it balanced?" is a question that many game players, and all game designers, ask about a game. But it can mean different things to different people.

Most generally, "balanced" means that a game has—at the outset—an even chance of being won by any player at the table. If the game heavily favors the first player (for example), then the game is unbalanced: it's not fair to the other players.

But there are other ways to consider the matter. A common design problem is the runaway leader, where the first player to gain an advantage will almost certainly win. Even if the chances of winning are even at the start of the game, they may quickly become very uneven.

Some players take this notion to extremes, and consider any game unbalanced if the final scores show much separation. Others reject this idea on the grounds that it renders all of the game except the final few moves irrelevant to the outcome.

One of the reasons I built the Rails Across America simulator was to test the balance of the game. I instrumented the simulator to record scores over runs of thousands of games, and to print out relevant statistics. The results were enlightening, and somewhat depressing.

I was looking for evidence of all three kinds of imbalance. After a fair amount of work I was able to tune the rules and map to the point where there was no significant starting imbalance in the four-player game: all players had a roughly equal chance of winning at the start of the game. (This was not quite as simple as looking at the stats for which player won most. A start-player advantage may only apply to intelligent players, and my so-called AI doesn't qualify. So I was also looking for imbalances in the choice of starting location. Turns out it's a bad idea to start at New York, but when I was done tuning, the other five Major Cities on the board were about equal.)

Next I looked at the scoring curves. What was the range of final scores, what was an average score, how sharply pointed was the bell curve? Also I looked at the bell curve for the point spread: what was the difference in final scores between the winner and the biggest loser in each game? Since I want to avoid a runaway leader problem, but don't feel that every game needs to be really close, I was satisfied with curves that showed reasonable but not excessive grouping of final scores. Often a couple of players may be in a tight race for the win, while one or two others lag behind. Sometimes one player dominates, but certainly not always. That's a good distribution, in my opinion.

So what's depressing about all this? It's good, but only for the four-player game. With five, the game is badly imbalanced—at least one player is screwed from the start. The three-player game is worse. And I learned that the biggest factor affecting the balance is the map itself: merely playing with costs, rewards, and setup would not repair the imbalances. To have a good three- or five-player game, I'll need well-tuned three- and five-player maps. That's upsetting. The more restricted the recommended number of players, the fewer copies will sell. To make it less restrictive I have to add more boards, which adds expense.

Probably the best compromise is a two-sided board, with the 4p map on one side and the 5p on the other, and forget about the three-player game. If I'm lucky and work hard at it, I might also be able to make a subsection of one map serve for three players.

The next question is: Is it worth the trouble? But that's an issue for another post.

Adventures in Simulation

2008-11-15T15:44:00.001-08:00

Rails Across America seems to be shaping up nicely, but it's clear that it will need a lot of careful tuning. Is there a first player advantage, and if so how can I eliminate it? Is there a clearly dominant strategy? How many rounds does an average game last? How many components (track, money, etc) are required? How should costs and payouts best be balanced? And so on—a myriad questions.

To answer these questions, I decided I needed a simulator, a program that would actually play the game—and play it quickly, so that I could whip through hundreds of games in an evening. With a good simulator, I can test lots of things just by tweaking input parameters: # of players, # of goods colors, # of goods cubes, costs, payouts, starting money, and much more. For more radical experiments I may have to recode the simulator for changed rules or variant strategies, but that's not too hard once the first version is built and running.

Well, I'm a computer programmer. This is the kind of challenge that usually makes me go "oboy!" and code madly for a few hours—then give up in disgust when I realize how difficult it's really going to be. This time, I went "oboy" and coded madly for a few hours, and actually had the bones of a decent simulator at the end of it. So far so good!

"Bones" aren't enough, though. The first version played very stupidly, and that's no good because it skews the results. I don't need it to play at grandmaster level, but it needs to play at least a plausible beginner's-level game. That's the big challenge; the rest is just boiler-plate code. After several days of work, I'm pleased to report that the gadget now plays a passable game: not as good as an experienced live player, but credible. And it is fast: it can play 10,000 games in five minutes or less.

I've given it two forms of output. If I have it play just one game, it prints out every action taken by every player, then summarizes each player's accomplishments at the end. If I have it play multiple games, it collects statistics and just prints those.

Just to set expectations, here's what this gadget is not: It is not a device for playing the game interactively against a computer, or against human opponents without a board. Also it is not a general-purpose boardgame simulator. When I want a simulator for the next game I design, I'll have to start coding from scratch again.

Here's another thing it's not: It is not a substitute for real playtesting. I hope it will tell me a lot about my game, but it won't tell me whether the game is fun, or has rules that irritate or confuse live players, or induces too much AP, or simply takes too long to play. I don't want to waste real people's time making experiments that I can perform on my own. But if the game survives the simulations, I'll start badgering friends to try it out.

Forgive me, but I feel like I have to add this: If you are a game designer and would like a simulator for your own designs, please do not ask me to build one for you. I'll just say no. This project has taken me days, with more yet to go, and I haven't got enough to spare. I'd never get any of my own projects done if I started coding for other folks.

But if it continues to go well, and anybody shows any interest, I might be willing to post the Java source code for download. I doubt it will be useful to anyone, but ya never know.

Rails Across America

2008-10-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

After another playtest this evening, with new components and scoring, I've decided the rail-game design is showing enough promise to make it more official. I've given it a name—Rails Across America—and begun a Game Journal for it here, at the Board Game Designers Forum. Further details about the game's rules and components will appear there. I'll post here also if and when any more "milestones" occur.

Wait, I Did That Already...

2008-10-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

In my recent post I Wanna Design Railroad Tycoon! I expressed my desire to (a) build a rail game, and (b) build one where ownership or development of the junctions was a primary goal. I had the notion that (b) hadn't been done before, or at least not often.

The other day I had a penny-dropped moment: I have already designed such a game. It's Spatial Delivery, in which players build trade routes ("rails in space") to reach prime locations for trade stations.

So now I feel kind of stupid for characterizing the new design's goal in that way. Fortunately, I can add a little verbiage and perhaps make it plain why the new design really isn't Spatial Delivery warmed over.

In SD, players build routes, but once built the routes are held in common. There is no ownership of the routes, and no reward is given for building them, beyond the fact that the route-builder gets to build a station at the end of each new route. Players do own the stations they build, receive substantial rewards for building them, and may receive further rewards if other players use them.

But in the more traditional rail game I'm now trying to design, the rails will be owned by the players who build them. As in SD, there may be no immediate reward simply for building rail. But there will likely be rewards for building a given strategic route before other players can do so, because by doing so you can get some rewards from late-comers who want to share the route, and you can block others from using the route altogether. The race for connectivity, for expanding your network strategically, will be an integral part of the game. This isn't the case in SD, where connectivity isn't much of an issue (because if anybody can get from point A to point B, so can everybody else).

Another difference is that in SD, making deliveries gets you Victory Points. In the new design, I think that deliveries will get you cash, which you will then spend to build more rails and to build train stations. (I say I think because the design is still up in the air.) There's nothing new about this mechanism, of course; it's just different from SD.

Reiner Knizia was the first person who told me (at a seminar, not face-to-face) that the victory conditions have a huge effect on gameplay. It's a fairly obvious point, yet before that I was thinking in terms of coming up with a bunch of nifty mechanisms, and then just slapping a win condition onto the end of the rules. But of course, the goal of the game informs all of the players' decisions. In my rail game, I have a set of reasonable mechanisms that might contribute to a good game. But I won't be able to tell until I've tuned the scoring system correctly (or given it up as a bad job). I want connectivity to be important, but I also want the stations to be significant. I want the famous "multiple paths to victory", so that a player might win by building stations, or by building the best network, or by making the most money from deliveries. To do that will require some careful tuning and balancing.

And that's my next goal for this design: to come up with a reasonably well-tuned scoring system. If I can do that, I'll have a game. After that, it'll just be playtest, tune, and repeat until it's good enough.

Well, that's the plan, anyway. Nothing ever goes that smoothly!

Later: I tried a solo playtest of the latest rules (including scoring) this evening. It worked fairly well. The biggest problem may simply be the lack of anything very new or different from other rail games. It's a mix of familiar mechanisms, with nothing in it you haven't seen before. But while originality is nice, few games offer anything really new. I won't worry about it too much.

California Academy of Sciences

2008-10-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

Helen and I visited the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco last weekend. This museum-and-research institution was founded over 150 years ago, and recently re-opened in new digs following its partial destruction in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

The new Academy is amazing. I don't know any better word to use to describe it. Check out the Web site (see link above) and see for yourself a little about what it's like—but you won't really understand until you can visit.

I could ramble on for pages. To avoid that, I'll just briefly describe the most amazing feature. This is the Rain Forest, contained inside a glass sphere 90 feet in diameter. The sphere contains maybe 10 feet of water at the bottom, in which hundreds of fish swim (and some of them are huge). From ground level, trees go up four stories, and are filled with birds and butterflies. Side exhibits include a bat cave (we watched a curator hand-feeding little bits of fruit to the hanging bats) and a large leaf-cutter ant farm. You enter at ground level, and follow a ramp that spirals up the inside of the dome. At each level there's something different to see: the fish, the plants, the birds, and the omnipresent butterflies that float around you. From the top, a glass elevator takes you down under the water for a close-up view of the underwater life. It is stunning; I think I could spend all day there, just in that one dome.

And there's more: the Morrison Planetarium (which we missed, for lack of time), the Steinhart Aquarium (still reigned over by the resident albino alligator), and even the roof which is covered with earth and planted with low-maintenance native groundcover.

Go, see it, it's wonderful. But don't drive there. We had an absolutely terrible time finding parking, and the traffic jams were horrific. Take BART to the city, then grab one of the buses that will take you straight to the Academy's door. Oh, and buy your tickets ahead of time on the Web, it will save you time getting in.

I Wanna Design Railroad Tycoon!

2008-10-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

It's my favorite game, is Railroad Tycoon. And I like most rail games in general. They offer a type of competitive problem that I particularly enjoy. Every design is different, but often you are competing with other players for real estate and scarce resources, while constrained by connectivity and budgeting. In Railroad Tycoon, the real estate is the rail you lay between cities, and the connection points to those cities. The scarce resources are the goods to be delivered. Laying rail costs money; to raise money you can issue shares or make deliveries to increase your income.

Games like this offer the player a rich matrix of decisions. With a limited number of actions to complete your goals, every action is a significant choice. You need to build as early as possible, to grab scarce real estate before someone else does. But you need money to do that. Make deliveries first, to raise money? Or issue shares to get instant money? But shares will cost you more money, and penalty points, later; and if you delay the deliveries, someone else may "steal" them from you. No wonder rail games are fascinating!

This isn't a new or original pattern. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of rail games. Many form easily-extensible systems: the 18XX series, Age of Steam and its many expansions, the crayon rail games. Rail games are easy to extend because once you have a good basic game, you can vary it with new maps and minor rule tweaks to keep it fresh.

So with all these excellent rail games already available, why would I want to design another? The real answer is that I like rail games, so I'd like to have the experience of designing one myself, hopefully a good one. But I could also reply that new rail games come out every year, and if they're good, they get bought and played. There's clearly room for a few more yet.

Of course, I can't design Railroad Tycoon. (As Helen told me: "You know it's been done, right?") So I needed a new idea. Seth Jaffee has a nice design called Reading Railroad, which has a new twist: he's melded a word game with a rail game. The result is much more rail game than word game; it's fresh and different and it works well. But I wasn't looking for anything quite that radical.

What I came up with is this. In most rail games, you compete for the connections between locations. The locations themselves are usually not owned or monopolized by the players. I decided to try a design in which the rail network is built as a means to the end of "owning" the junctions: you are building stations and switchyards. (I'd be surprised if this actually hasn't been done before; but I haven't seen it and it doesn't seem to be common.)

I followed my usual design procedure: did a lot of thinking, wrote it up on the computer, refined it until it looked good. Then I made a quick-and-dirty mockup and tried a solo game, pretending to be four players at once. As usual, the initial design didn't work very well. I took the lessons learned, rethought things for another couple of days, and came up with a different variation, and tried that one. And it was better, but still flawed... I'll spare you the details, but I'm still trying out different ideas. I may wander away from the original notion altogether; I've learned not to be too wedded to my original notions.

What surprises me, again and again, is how difficult it is to design a truly interesting, playable game. More than once I've started with a successful but complex game (someone else's, of course) and tried to trim it down into something similar but simpler. And every time, it's failed. Yesterday I played a Railroad Tycoon variant, designed by a fan of the game. It's pretty much the same rules as the base game, just a few variations for interest's sake, and (the main difference) a new map. And it was... lackluster. It worked, but money wasn't tight and there wasn't as much interaction between the players as there should have been. I don't want to damn the variant on the basis of one play; maybe the map was designed for more than the four players we had, for example. Still, either of the two official versions (the original Railroad Tycoon and the Rails of Europe expansion) offer much superior play experiences.

And there's my own design. I borrowed some notions from RRT, some from other rail games, added a notion of my own... as I said, there are bazillions of good rail games. How hard can it be to come up with another one?

Apparently it can be pretty tough. So far I'm not impressed with my own design. But... at least it's not a complete heap of trash. Used to be, all my new designs turned out to be steaming heaps. Lately they've been almost-playable, with a strong sense that there might be a real game lurking in there somewhere, if I can only find it. I guess I'm getting better at this game design stuff, but I clearly have a long way to go.

Rick and the Beanstalk

2008-10-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

It seems to be called a "space elevator" these days, but I prefer the term beanstalk. In the fairy tale Jack climbed a magic beanstalk up to the giant's castle in the sky, but there are serious people today who think we could build a stalk that would ascend all the way from the ground to geosynchronous orbit.

This would be tremendous. Space travel today is dangerous, inefficient and hideously expensive, because chemical rockets are the only way we have to get off of Earth. But a beanstalk would let us ride an elevator into orbit. Properly built, it could be much safer and orders of magnitude cheaper, pound for pound, to put payloads into space. (Well, it would be cheaper once you'd recovered the cost of building it. It won't be cheap.)

We don't have the technology for a beanstalk yet. But I just read an article that says we might have it soon, and that's incredibly exciting news. Here's the full article:

'Space elevator' would take humans into orbit

I did find the article a bit amusing at a couple of places.

"Indeed, if successfully built, the space elevator would be an unprecedented feat of human engineering."

...ya think? It's only a tower that's over 22,000 miles tall.

"It is thought that inertia ... will cause the cable to stay stretched taut..."

Well, yes. It is also thought that if you drop a heavy rock onto your bare toes, it will hurt. This isn't some new, untested theory. Isaac Newton would have understood the space elevator perfectly 300 years ago, had he thought of it. Certainly there are plenty of engineering problems to be solved. But the basics, while unintuitive to us ground-dwellers, are simple and certain. If you make a cable long and strong enough and put it in place: yes, it will stay stretched taut.

I'm not going to start celebrating yet, but some experts think there's a chance that I could see a beanstalk actually built, or at least begun, in my lifetime. I'll have to take care of myself, and hope I inherited the longevity of my mother's family, but hey--it could happen!

Email Grail

2008-09-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

Warning: Lengthy rant ahead.

Email, my friends. Sounds so simple--a program that will reliably send and receive email, and has just a few reasonable bells and whistles to help me through my day.

Yesterday I went through a dozen and a half email clients for Mac OS X, and found not one that met all my needs.

I used to use Eudora, and I was happy. But Eudora has become decrepit: it is unsupported, and unreliable on Mac OS X Leopard. (It even lost some mail once. I used Eudora for over a decade and never lost a byte, but under Leopard it can lose mail. Unacceptable!)

So a while back I switched to Apple Mail, and groused about it because I lost some of Eudora's niftier features. But it mostly does what I want, and has its own virtues including really excellent search capabilities, tied into Spotlight. But...

Apple Mail has some bizarre problem in talking to my ISP's SMTP server. It takes forever to send outgoing mail, and most of the time it fails. Other folks on the Web have reported similar troubles, but none of their suggestions have helped. In despair I have had to go hunting for yet another email client.

I found 17 candidates, and every one of them is lacking in some fashion. My requirements are fairly simple—or so I thought:

Keep messages in individual files (this is a standard, RFC 822)
Handle large amounts of mail and multiple accounts gracefully
Good search capability
Good filtering capability
Supported product

There are three reasons I wanted one-file-per-message. First and foremost, I do not trust proprietary database formats. If the database gets damaged, I've lost everything. If the product stops working, I've lost everything. Yes, most of them have an export-to-standard-format ability, but I have to know that I'm about to lose everything before it actually happens, or else the capability is useless. Database storage is a deal-breaker for me.

Second, on rare occasions I need to actually edit received mail. (Usually this is because some misguided customer has sent me their credit card number, which is information I don't want and shouldn't have. I edit it out of the email immediately when that happens.) Mail should be stored in an editable format, even if the mail client itself doesn't overtly support such editing.

Third, monolithic mailbox files have to be backed up every time a message is added or deleted. This is inefficient and wastes space on my backup media.

During my research, I discovered several more requirements, stuff I'd been taking for granted:

Rich text (aka HTML mail) - Maybe the world would be better without it, but my customers use it. A lot.
Folder/subfolder organization for saved mail - Other paradigms exist, but I have tens of thousands of messages organized in folders, and I'm not about to reorganize them now.
Import from Apple Mail - Right. Duh. Almost forgot about that detail.
Decent spam filtering - I get about a thousand spams a day.

So how did all the candidates stack up? Here they are, each with their primary deal-breaker:

Balzac - Can't organize in folders.
Correo - Somebody's hobby. Too new, too feature-poor, too little support.
Entourage - Database. (Also, Microsoft. Feh!)
Eudora - Unsupported, crashy.
GNUMail - Unsupported since early 2007; home Web site is offline. OS X info sketchy.
GyazMail - No outgoing HTML mail. (Man, that was disappointing. This one looked good otherwise.)
Magellan Pro - Unsupported since 2004.
Mailsmith - Database, and no HTML mail.
Mulberry - Poor spam filtering, poor import capabilities.
Musashi - Old. Documentation is thin and in poor English.
Nisus Email - Irritating UI: no built-in text editor, omnipresent floating window even in other apps.
Odysseus - Supposed to be a Eudora clone, but it's still in beta.
Opera Mail - Integrated with Web browser, feh.
PowerMail - Database.
SeaMonkey - Integrated with Web browser, feh.
Thunderbird - Ah, Thunderbird...

I finally decided it would have to be Thunderbird. It's open source, vigorously supported, mature, and feature-rich. It keeps mail in mbox format like Eudora: not ideal for backups, but at least it's standard, editable, and recoverable. Its ability to import from Apple Mail was poor and clumsy, but the Web site explained how to do it and it works. (As of this writing, I've imported less than half my mail. It's a multi-step operation for each mail folder.)

Just when I was starting to relax, I hit a near-deal-breaker: Thunderbird has no ability to redirect mail! Redirecting is sending a piece of received mail on to another address, without altering the message body. Thunderbird only has forwarding, which does alter the message body. Redirection is crucial to our home business, where I receive customer purchase notifications and have them auto-redirected to Helen, who imports them into our customer database. Her importer relies on the format of the messages, which is why we need redirection and not just forwarding.

I was stunned. Every mail client I've ever used has had redirection. It never occurred to me that a mature, feature-rich product like Thunderbird would lack it!

Well, Thunderbird is extensible, and there are hundreds of extensions. After some searching, I found two that add a redirection capability. But one doesn't work well with recent Thunderbird releases, and neither allows redirection as a filtering action. It took me probably an hour to get all that figured out.

Finally I had to get Helen's attention (she wasn't pleased, she was busy with aggro of her own) and have her investigate her parser to see whether it could handle a forwarded purchase notification. And we dodged the bullet: her parser handles a Thunderbird-forwarded message just fine. Whew!

I think Thunderbird will work out. If I get really upset about some lack or other, I might be able to write an extension of my own to fix the problem. Hope I won't have to, though. Email ought to just work.

The Need for Speed

2008-09-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

I fence foil, and I've been at it for several years now. Most people enjoy doing things they're good at, and often don't enjoy things they're bad at, and I'm usually no exception. But, but, but... I love fencing, and I'm not good at it. Oh, I'm not hopeless: I look pretty good during drill because I pay attention and practice hard at correct form and technique. But when it's time to actually fence, it's a different story.

Let me explain. There's no such thing as an unstoppable attack, nor an impenetrable defense. Any attack can be foiled (literally) with the right parry. The trick is to use the right move at the right time, and that's been my bête noir. You can't know what the right move is until you see what your opponent is doing, and that means you have to observe and react very quickly.

Recently I had a bout with a relative beginner. At one point she launched an attack. Since she expected me to parry, her attack included a circling movement intended to evade my parry. And I expected that, so I executed a viciously fast, perfectly precise parry-four-counter-four: a simple parry followed by a circular parry. The circular parry was to pick up her blade in case she succeeded in evading the first parry.

And it didn't work. She hit me, poink, right on target. While I was showing off with my fast, precise parries, she was still executing her circular attack, so wide and so slow that it went all the way around my fancy tight maneuvers, and hit me well after I was done.

Had I actually responded to her attack, I could have stopped her easily. There was plenty of time. But instead I just chose a defense I hoped would work, and it was completely wrong. Even with that slllloooooowwww attack, I was unable to respond appropriately.

So now I'm wishing I hadn't so thoroughly ignored my kids' video games all these years. Maybe my reflexes would be better if I'd had more practice! But I'm working on it--it's never too late to learn. Someday, I might even be good enough to handle a complete noob!

Heir and Regent

2008-09-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I began designing a game called "Heir and Regent." I didn't get far with it; it felt like a formless blob to me and I couldn't see how to bring any order to it. I dropped the design as a result and ignored it for several years.

But my good buddy Seth Jaffee always liked the basic idea, and periodically pokes me to see if he can get me to revisit it. Recently I did, finding that the intervening years of playing and designing other games has given me a much larger toolbox of ideas. I've dusted it off, re-thought some of the basic notions, added some new ideas, and the design is now taking some real shape and even showing a little progress.

There's still a long way to go with it. It's a two-player card game with a custom deck of cards. The rules, scoring, and card deck composition are all still up in the air; I make changes every time I try a solo playtest.

I've begun a "Game Journal" (a blog of sorts dedicated to a single game design) over at the Board Game Designers Forum, where Seth and most of my other design buddies hang out. If you'd like to follow its development, here's the link to Heir and Regent.

ConQuest SF

2008-09-04T16:41:00.001-07:00

Helen and I spent most of Labor Day weekend at ConQuest SF, a four-day gaming convention. Although ConQuest is primarily for wargamers, they offer plenty to interest the non-war boardgamers, like us and our friends.

We had a very good time, although in some ways it was pretty low-key. These conventions offer tournaments, demos of new games, seminars, and more; and in the past we've sampled all of these activities. In addition to scheduled events, I usually look forward to some playtesting of unpublished designs-in-progress, and I hope to discover at least one really exciting game that I haven't played before.

But this time, we mostly just played games with our friends. We skipped the scheduled stuff altogether, except for the flea market, and even that was pretty small and disappointing. We did pick up a copy of Hare and Tortoise, and Helen spotted a vintage copy of Risk that I was able to score for a measly $8. I'm not a big Risk fan; what attracted me was that this version of the game contains approximately a bazillion little wooden cubes in each of six colors -- a real prize for a game designer who needs bits for prototypes!

I played a number of games that were new to me, but nearly all were disappointing and there were several that I outright disliked. (These included Ruse & Bruise and Phoenicia). The one new game that I did rather like was Metropolys. It didn't make me want to rush out and buy a copy, but I certainly wouldn't mind playing it at least a few more times.

There were no interesting prototypes being played, at least that I noticed (there were one or two that I deemed uninteresting). With one exception: Candy Weber's Coronets. I missed that session, but that's okay because I've played it before and expect to be able to play it again. She tells me it's coming along nicely and that some of my feedback from an earlier session has been incorporated. (Yay, I'm helping!)

On Monday the con was still in progress, but we were exhausted; so we slept in and then invited a friend over to play a few more games quietly at home. That was a good day, too.

For Sale: French Horn

2008-08-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

We're a musical family. At some point in our lives, we have all played at least one instrument. And every musician I know (singers excepted) cannot resist a musical instrument, even one they cannot play -- because, you know, you might learn to play it if it's lying around the house in easy reach! We have one or more trumpets, trombones, clarinets, saxophones, guitars, and pianos, and a plethora of less mainstream items including recorders, ocarinas, jaw harps, and washboards. Every one of them can be played, at least a little bit, by somebody in the house.

And they pile up -- that's how we got so many. I am trying to remember the occasions on which we have let a musical instrument go, out of our house and our lives, and there aren't many. An old student trumpet went to the daughter of a friend (we still kept two cornets, one regular trumpet, one pocket trumpet, and one slide trumpet, in varying states of repair); an upright piano is on "indefinite loan" to some other friends (replaced by a nice electronic piano). And that about covers it, up until this weekend. A few years ago, one of my sons decided he wanted to play the french horn in school band. We got him a nice used Olds in good condition. And he practiced it, and demonstrated a good ear, a better embouchure than the usual beginner, and overall a good deal of promise.

But the stress of marching band eventually got to him (don't get me started about that school's treatment of music as some kind of competitive sport) and the horn languished. This summer, he got fired up about music again, but this time he wants to be a rock drummer.

And right there, you have every parent's nightmare. Of course he wants to be a rock drummer! Every teenager in America, near as I can tell, wants to be a rock drummer. And no matter how many other instruments we've had in the house, we've never had anything quite as loud as a full drum kit. But we will not stifle any musical ambition that our children may show; so we are encouraging this. And he is working hard at it: practicing daily, finding a teacher, and listening analytically to a wide variety of rock and jazz. As he did with the french horn, he is showing considerable talent and promise at drums. If he sticks with it, he'll be pretty good.

But... there is nobody in the house to play the french horn. I'm a brass man, and I think french horns are things of beauty. And I can pick up most brass instruments and just start playing them -- I can play a baritone horn like I've practiced it for years, but I actually have less than an hour of time with the instrument, lifetime total. But the french horn is a different beast, I find. Its length gives it an incredible range and a set of harmonics that are extremely close together. The mouthpiece, while superficially similar, is different enough from cornet and trumpet to exacerbate the problem. The bottom line: my kid plays french horn better than I do. And anyway, I'm a jazz musician; I have no place to play a french horn even if I learned how.

So now it's up for sale, on Craig's List. This blog entry is not a plea for you to go buy it; if you want a french horn, you're already over at Craig's List looking for one, and you don't need my urging here. I just wanted to sigh a bit. Because although it's an awkward size and shape that we could never properly store, and the family finances will benefit from selling it... it really is a beautiful thing, and I hate to see it go.

Horns always sound distant; it's part of their allure. For a while, it was closer to us. Now it's distant again. Sigh...

Olympic Gold for NBC

2008-08-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

In past years, Helen and I have been disgusted with the quality of American television coverage of the Olympic Games. The broadcasters spent far too much time on fluff pieces, background stories and interviews of the athletes, and they have paid a disproportionate amount of attention to American athletes and their medal contentions. We wanted to see world class sports, and we wanted to see a wide variety. Too much attention to non-event programming and to only those sports in which Americans did well left us extremely unsatisfied.

This year, I'm delighted to find that NBC is actually doing a pretty good job. They haven't given up the interviews and background stuff, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much of it. They have spent too much time replaying highlights over and over, especially those in which Americans starred, but at least the highlights are short.

A hit, a palpable hit!

Naturally the network is still paying extra attention to those sports in which Americans have medal hopes. In one respect this was good for me, because it meant that at long last, we were treated to some fairly lengthy and detailed coverage of fencing.

I'm a fencer myself (definitely not of Olympic quality), and I can almost never find fencing on television. (I mean sport fencing, not choreographed swashbucklers.) I'll admit that there's at least one good reason for this: fencing is too fast and subtle to make good television. TV only shows 30 frames per second, which is about 33 milliseconds between frames. But some fencing moves happen much faster than that; they literally can't be captured on TV. And while some fencing actions are large and dramatic, others are tiny. It's a game of centimeters and millimeters, and again TV isn't going to do a good job of capturing that.

Nevertheless, NBC gave significant coverage to women's team and individual sabre, and men's team sabre. The US fencers won more medals in the 2008 games than in all the games going back for over 50 years. NBC provided color commentators that did a reasonable job of explaining what was going on, and they had slow-motion replays of the interesting points. (I was hoping for super-slo-mo, which might actually have been able to capture the fastest action; but regular slow-motion was still worth watching.)

Faster, Higher, Stronger Bandwidth

It's possible that our rosy view of these games' coverage is due to satellite TV and a Tivo; these amenities let us record an awful lot of coverage, and easily skip the boring bits. Perhaps if we saw only the VHF broadcasts we'd be less happy. But we had satellite and Tivo for the 2004 Athens games, and I think the 2008 is significantly better.

One piece of new technology (okay, a lot of interlocking pieces of new technology!) has definitely improved my experience of these games. The NBCOlympics Web site contains a staggering number of hours of streamable video, apparently covering every sport at the games. As much as I enjoyed watching the sabre bouts on broadcast, I'm a foil fencer and I wanted to see foil. And on NBCOlympics.com they've got it, hours and hours of it. This footage lacks the commentary (which is fine with me) yet includes the slow-motion replays.

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/all/index.html

But I give MSNBC a downcheck for making me install yet another browser plug-in from Microsoft in order to see those videos, something called "SilverLight". It does a perfectly good job of showing the videos, but so do several other prior standards; and incredibly SilverLight lacks proper controls for rewind and fast-forward. Why couldn't they just use QuickTime? (Answer: Because Microsoft are control freaks, and they didn't invent QuickTime. Today the Olympics, tomorrow the world!)

Bravo!

The bottom line: a very good job, although with room for improvement. Next time, let's have fewer and shorter interviews, and fewer replays of those interviews. Dump SilverLight, if it hasn't become a real standard with a real set of playback controls. And I wouldn't mind if they showed fewer hours of the standard team sports and more hours of the "little stuff" that you usually don't get to see. I can watch basketball, soccer, and baseball pretty much any time, and it's a shame to waste hours of Olympic coverage on it.

Playing Patience

2008-08-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

"Patience" has a double meaning to gamers: it can mean tolerantly waiting, or it can mean "solitaire". I've been doing some of both lately. I may write about solo play of Zombie in my Pocket and Wings of War: Burning Drachens another time, but today let's talk about waiting.

General Anxiety

Quite some while back, Helen and I jumped on the bandwagon and eagerly pre-ordered Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage. This game is highly rated, but had been out of print for a decade. When Valley Games announced a reprint, we signed up. And then we waited... and waited... and waited for the reprint to appear. It took many months longer than Valley Games had originally projected. During the wait, our excitement levels went from "Man! I can't wait!" to "Y'know, maybe this isn't really our kind of game." When it finally (finally!) arrived, we didn't rip off the shrink-wrap. We decided to wait a while longer, because...

...the Plastic Generals hadn't arrived. Y'see, the game has cardboard counters to represent the important generals in this war, but we brave and faithful pre-orderers were to receive a special bonus: sculpted plastic figurines of the generals. But they weren't ready when the game itself was ready. "Soon!" said Valley Games, so we decided to wait for them and think further about how much we really wanted to play this game. And we waited... and waited...

Containing Our Impatience

Some while after we had ordered Hannibal, we ordered Container from the same company. This seemed more up our alley, as it's an economic game rather than a war-and-politics game. But again with the waiting! And again, our pre-order bonus, a set of sculpted cargo containers to replace plain wooden blocks, were delayed even longer than the game itself. Both did eventually arrive; we've even played Container, though not yet with the new sculpted container bits.

Agricola Envy

The hottest new game this year is Agricola. It was first published only in German and only in Europe, but those who played it hyped it heavily. Having learned from Hannibal that not all popular games will appeal to us, we researched it, and decided it was up our alley. We pre-ordered an English-language edition from an online retailer. And now we are (all together, now) waiting... and waiting...

Many people who pre-ordered from the publisher already now have their English-language copies. Some who pre-ordered from other online retailers are receiving theirs. Still no word about ours.

We did, however, get to play it the other evening. A friend of ours had just received his copy and invited us over. It did seem like a pretty good game, so we are still eager to receive our own copy and dig into it.

Patience is a Virtue

How shall I wrap up this little suite of cautionary tales? I am not really sure what lesson is to be learned here. Perhaps it is All things come to him who waits, since we did eventually get everything we were waiting for (except Agricola, and surely it will arrive Any Day Now.) Or possibly it's Be careful what you wish for; you might (eventually) get it, since after all that drooling and waiting for Hannibal, we are now considering trading it away, still in shrinkwrap. Or maybe the lesson is more pragmatic: Don't believe in publisher's schedules. Fantasy Flight Games has had one particular game in development for going on ten years now; it has been announced, delayed, dropped, and re-announced several times, and still seems at best a year away. (And it sounds like it could be really cool, too.)

What the hey. Sometimes the wait is well worth it. We pre-ordered the second printing of Through the Ages, waited patiently and then impatiently... and when it arrived, it was wonderful and looks as though it will be a favorite for years to come. (Well, except that it was short a few pieces and plagued by several misprints, and we had to order the "fix pack" and wait for it to come...)

The Big Games

2008-08-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

In my previous post about Die Macher, I commented that an exceptionally long game needs to deliver an exceptional experience. I also mentioned that I am a fan of several games that run as long, or longer, than Die Macher. Here are the games I was thinking of:

Roads and Boats is unlike any other game in our collection. Most of the action is simultaneous, which is good because it means the game can take four hours instead of all day. R&B has its down sides: for example it is an incredibly "fiddly" game, by which I mean there are dozens and dozens of tiny cardboard chits to be stacked, unstacked, and moved around the board. "Fiddly" can also refer to the finicky calculations needed to efficiently produce, route, and deliver these chits. R&B is a civilization-building game, in which you start with a few donkeys and geese, and some boards and stone, and by the end you hope to have trucks, steamships, factories, and stock exchanges. To accomplish this, you must transport goods to appropriate locations, use them to build new facilities that will manufacture new goods, and lather, rinse, repeat until you have a civilization.

Raods and Boats is a definite brain-burner, and one that has little panache. (No pirates, no spaceships, no ninjas, no monsters, no wars, just... donkeys.) But you do get the pleasure of creating a functioning and intricate machine, of building your civ up from nearly nothing into a sprawling, prosperous nation. There is continual change in the gameplay: breeding donkeys in the beginning, building factories in the middle, finally building mints and stock exchanges and pushing your gold production for all it's worth. The satisfaction of building coupled with the changing "story arc" is what preserves your interest for a full four hours.

Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition, by contrast, has incredible panache. This is a sprawling space opera of a game, where every player has his own alien race competing for supremacy with all the others. A game of TI3 does not have to last all day, but we once ran an 8-player, 12-hour session with the Shattered Empire expansion, and it was a great day. TI3 seems to have a little bit of everything. It is in large part a wargame: you can build fleets of starships, annex unoccupied worlds, and conquer occupied ones. But without ever fighting a battle you can also engage in trade, vote on issues that can actually alter the rules of the game, and climb the "technology tree" to improve your race's capabilities -- and you can win by doing so.

Fantasy Flight Games made TI3 one of their premier productions, and the game comes with wonderful artwork, background stories for all the races, and finely detailed plastic miniature spaceships. The game stays interesting throughout because your empire keeps expanding (or shrinking!), you gain new abilities as you climb the tech tree, you can set long-term goals to work toward, and you have an ever-changing constellation of neighboring races to fend off, maneuver past, or negotiate with.

Through the Ages is one of our very favorite games these days. In TTA certain cards represent technologies. You acquire these cards via competitive drafting from a common pool, but you can't make use of them until you have acquired and spent sufficient "science points", basically using research as a currency for purchasing tech. Once purchased, most of these technologies have to be built, which requires spending resources produced by your mines. Once built, they must be staffed, so you must allocate some population to them, and your people have to be fed by your farms. And so on -- it's much more complex than that.

TTA also lacks a map, a fact that astonishes (and dismays) some people. Usually civ-builders are all about maps, and usually they include some aspect of wars or battles that take place on the map. Yet TTA preserves the notion of military conflict. Some of the techs are military, and building and staffing them increases the might of your armies. Military conflict isn't tactical; instead it's a matter of who can summon the most military strength from their visible and hidden resources.

TTA keeps your interest by a constant process of building your civ's capabilities: agriculture, mining, research, government, population, military, and more must all be grown and kept in reasonable balance. This constant growth, the need for balance, and the pressure from your opponents keep the game fascinating throughout.

By now a theme should be apparent: what a game requires to keep interest alive is change. Doing the same thing all afternoon and into the evening gets boring. A game that keeps presenting new and different challenges to you, and that lets you build something to show that the preceding hours weren't wasted, is a good game.

Die Macher

2008-08-04T17:21:00.000-07:00

Saturday night, Helen and I played Die Macher. We had played a couple of times before; three other players were new to the game. It was quite an experience.

Die Macher (which is about electioneering in Germany) is a real "gamer's game." It is rich in choices: gamers like having lots of viable options, and Die Macher delivers in spades. It is also rich in player interaction, and in mechanisms. All this richness means it takes over an hour to explain the rules to a new player. We started shortly after 3pm, but couldn't get the game itself going until about 5pm. The game is advertised as lasting four hours, and maybe it does with experienced players. It took us until well past 1am!

And how much did I enjoy this experience? Well sir, I'm still trying to make up my mind about that. Some of my favorite games are long and complex -- some even longer than Die Macher. On the other hand, six-hours-plus is a long time to sit in one chair and do one thing; a game had better deliver a pretty amazing experience to make that worthwhile.

I like games in which I can always find something constructive to do, and Die Macher certainly delivers. But I also prefer games in which I can build something I can rely on -- building something is only helpful if the others players can't simply knock it down again. In Die Macher it can feel like everything you do is ultimately futile. Actually you can build up quite a bit of solid progress in Die Macher, but it can still be discouraging.

Still, I enjoyed this session more than my previous ones. Die Macher is so complex that in earlier plays, I had very little idea of how to intelligently proceed. This time I was able to make informed decisions, which was definitely fun and satisfying. Perhaps after another play or two, I'll feel really at home with the game, and then my opinion of it may rise.

But I don't know how long it will be before I get more chances to play. Die Macher is really designed for five players. That and its great length and complexity means it's not going to hit the table very often, especially since there are other games I'd rather play when I have that much time. I'm sure I will play it again anyway: I'd like at least one more shot at it, and Helen loves it. And next time, maybe we can both do better than we did on Saturday!

Spatial Delivery

2008-08-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

Most of you who know me, know that my game Spatial Delivery won the 2008 KublaCon design contest, and as a result is being considered for publication by a major European company. The current status is that I received an email about a month ago, confirming that they had received the prototype in their Canadian office. They said they'd be evaluating it there for a couple of weeks, then sending it on to their main office in Europe. It should be in Europe by now, but I haven't heard anything new.

I'm not really expecting to hear anything for a while, perhaps quite a while. Game publishers are notorious for taking their time about these things. Of course I find patience to be difficult to achieve, so I check my email obsessively every day, hoping for word. When I hear anything definite, I'll be sure to post here about it.

In the meantime, I think I'll go check my email again!

No Mother-in-law Jokes!

2008-08-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

My mother-in-law Joan is a truly marvelous person. She lives up in Oregon and comes to visit us once or twice a year. Helen infected her with the boardgame virus, and she is an enthusiastic gamer building her own collection of games. Whenever we visit, down here or up there, games come along and are played daily.

Over on the right you can see my list of Recently Played Games, supplied courtesy of BoardGameGeek. This week, most of them were played with Joan and Helen, and often with our kids and our gaming friends. It's been a good week. Joan also likes to make these visits an occasion to acquire a few new games. She has purchased Silverton for herself, a game we're all interested in trying; in part it attracted her attention because it can be played solitaire as well as multi-player, so she can play with it when her gaming friends aren't available.

Not content with that, she has put a copy of Brass on pre-order for us: this is a fine new game by Martin Wallace that I've played once and am eager to play again. And still not content, she dropped a copy of Wings of War: Burning Drachens on me, having learned that I like the base game and that I've been eyeballing the Burning Drachens expansion for some time. Thank you, Joan!

In addition to these new items, we're on the pre-order list for Agricola, which is the hottest new game to come out for several years. Today we got the good news that the English-language edition has finally arrived in America, and we should have it in hand within a couple of weeks. Joan has also ordered Agricola for herself, and it's another game that's reputed to be an excellent solitaire as well as a multi-player game.

All in all, July was a good month for gaming and visiting, and August is getting off to a great start.

Welcome to My Joint

2008-08-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

"Rick's Café Américain," I've discovered, is not an original name for a blog by someone named "Rick." I wanted the url to be rixcafe.blogspot.com, but somebody already had that... and someone had rickscafe too, so I gave up on the cute url. But I've kept the banner anyway; I've been naming my personal machines "rixcafe" for years, and I refuse to give up on it entirely.

This blog is somewhat inspired by one a friend of mine keeps, Seth Jaffee at http://sedjtroll.blogspot.com. He writes about one of my strong interests, playing and designing boardgames, and I like reading his posts. It made me think that perhaps a few of my friends might enjoy something similar from me. (Convincing myself of this has been the main difficulty that stopped me from blogging before this.) And if not, I can still use it as a personal journal.

I'll probably be talking about a variety of subjects. Often (I expect) it will be boardgaming, but my other interests include music, fencing, fiction, comic strips, and computers, so no doubt those will make appearances from time to time as well.