I've completely lost track of what I've played. The week's almost a blur to me at this point, my body succumbing to days of fatigue, questionable eating habits, and unexpected emotional stresses. I barely know what day it is. I can tell you that I won the Acquire tournament and the team Catch Phrase tournament, crapped out early in both poker tournaments, finished second in Tigris and Euphrates and Tichu, the latter after getting set on a grand tichu call that should have been unstoppable (although I immediately called grand tichu again and made it), and lost in the semis of partnership cribbage.

On Wednesday night I ran this year's game show, and was heartbroken when the scoring system freaked out in round two. I made some changes to the code to accommodate ten more teams than last year (which, ironically, turned out to be unnecessary), and although the scoring code path in all three rounds is identical, somehow keystrokes started getting interpreted as the wrong letters/numbers. So mid-game we had to bail on automated scoring and have each team score themselves manually. Self-scoring is much faster than using the computer, though, so at least there was a silver lining. And the game itself went fine, exactly as I hoped it would go. Round one was the easiest round, round two saw teams start to differentiate themselves, and round three was the hardest. In fact, one team had a perfect score in rounds one and two, but tanked in round three allowing the Kraptastix to come from behind and win.

Last night I recorded a GeekSpeak with Derk and Aldie, who have been capitalizing on the ready availability of gaming personalities by bringing their audio recording equipment along. Oddly, the experience wasn't as much fun as I expected it to be-- it felt self-indulgent to spend two hours talking about myself. Perhaps that's inherent in the "this is your gaming life" format. I think I might have had more fun talking about topics other than myself. I was flattered to be asked, of course, but will anyone really care about anything we talked about? I dunno.

I have managed to play a couple of new games...

China: A revision of Web of Power with a new map and essentially the same gameplay. If you already have Web of Power, there's no need to upgrade. The key new rules are that each region's cloisters are scored immediately upon the region being filled (and unfilled regions get scored at the end of the game instead), and that a player can use a card to play a fortification on an empty cloister spot. Whoever builds a cloister there-- which could be (and usually is) the same player on the same turn-- scores double for that region when it scores and also scores double for any road scoring that cloister becomes involved in.

Kreta: Unlike Amazonas, this is a Stefan Dorra game I like. Players have identical set of action cards, each of which lets them do something different involving adding or moving pieces around the board. Once used, they can't be played again until someone plays a scoring card, at which point everyone retrieves their used cards. The big catch in the game is that there are about 25 different scoring focal points, and everyone can see the next two that will become active. The player who triggers a scoring reveals a new scoring nexus, and has the option to veto it and replace it with a new one drawn at random. So not all regions will score, and you won't have much notice about which ones are next. Some people felt this represented too random an element, but I found it perfectly fine. Not an A game, but probably somewhere in the B- to B range.

While I wait to play in the semis of the Tichu tournament (postponed so we can also play in partnership Crokinole), I thought I'd catch up on some more games played last night...

Manila: The first thiing you'll say upon seeing Manila is "Ooooooh, nice coins!" The overproduced plastic coins are a little too big for the room, so to speak, but are darn spiffy and typical of Zoch productions. This is a family game with strategic bidding, placement, and then a big element of luck as everything comes down to the roll of the dice. And we had a lot of fun with it. The uncertainty of the dice produces great moments full of anguished cries and happy cheers as unlikely circumstances come to pass. We acted on the buzz and started all the black market counters on the "0" space ABOVE the line on the chart, rather than on the bottom row below the line. This shortened the game, and admittedly I'd have liked another round or two, but time-wise it made the game clock in at what felt like exactly the right length. Not sure it has long-term staying power, but it'll get some mileage.

Tower of BabelReiner Knizia. Hans im Gluck. What could go wrong? But the early buzz on this game was mixed at best, generally downbeat at worst. I tried it with three players and found it dry, but interesting-- enough so that I plan to try again with five players (three was definitely sub-par-- the game involves structured deals/partnerships, and more players would certainly make that process more dynamic and varied). It's unlikely to knock anyone's socks off, however.

Sorry for the gap in reports, but I woke up on Monday with a mysterious pain in the knuckle of my left index finger, making it rather difficult to type. It seems to be lessening, and hopefully will be gone by Thursday.

In the meantime, I wiped out in the $20 buy-in no-limit Hold 'Em tournament (I played horribly-- all that World Poker Tour is apparently no substitute for actual table experience), won the Acquire tournament, and finished second in the Euphrat & Tigris tournament. Michael and I wisely opted not to defend our partnership Spades title this year, neatly avoiding a nine+ hour committment. Yeesh.

Heckmeck im Bratwurmeck (aka Pickomino): A great little dice game from Zoch and that clever Knizia fellow, elevated from "nice" to "will buy" by the production value. A set of white domino-like tiles numbered from 21 to... 36? are laid on the table. On turn a player rolls a bunch of special dice (with worms instead of sixes), and must keep all of any one value and reroll the rest. This process continues as long as the player wishes, but he cannot keep a value he kept on a previous roll. A player can stop at any time and take any available tile of an equal or lesser value than his accumulated total, or he can steal the most recently-collected tile from any other player if his total matches it exactly. If a player's can't keep any dice because they all match dice he's already kept, he craps out and loses a tile. A fun, quick-moving (though not necessarily fast-ending) game in a small box.

Diamant: From Alan Moon and Bruno Faidutti comes this terrific crowd-pleaser, already online at Brettspielwelt. What guarantees this game a spot in the collection is that it plays equally well-- and equally quickly-- with any number from three to eight. A terrific press-your-luck game. There are lots of grumbles about the price-- Funagain lists it at $40, which is a lot for such a light game. But it wouldn't surprise me to see an American version before too long, which is bound to be cheaper.

Amazonas: If I hadn't known this was a Stefan Dorra game, it would have been easy to guess. The board and pieces are very colorful and attractive-- lovely plumage-- but the game is typical Dorra-- dry, mechanical, and containing few surprises. It's not a bad game, but it's not to my taste and it doesn't pass the Would I Ever Say, "Hey, let's play Amazonas!" Test.

Since the hotel has wireless access in the ballroom and I have a laptop this year, I'll be blogging live from the Gathering of Friends.

Australia: A new Kramer/Kiesling collaboration from Ravensburger. After one play, I'd rate this as being at the top of their collaborative efforts. There's been some concern expressed about a last-player advantage, but the jury's still out. This is a placement game that doesn't use an action point system, so there shouldn't be any talk about it being in the Tikal / Java / Mexica family. The game plays quickly, and packs quite a bit of goodness into such a reasonable package. There are enough options on your turn to make decisions meaningful, but not so many that analysis paralysis sets in. Very much looking forward to playing this again, and it's on my "buy" list.

Ubongo: A big-box (some might say too big) from Kosmos. Did you hate Bongo and Ricochet Robot? Then run, don't walk, away from this. Each player takes a board showing a unique pattern and six possible sets of Tetris-like pieces. A die roll determines which set each player must use, and then everyone races to fit those pieces into their pattern. Then everyone draws new pattern boards, and you repeat until the deck of boards is gone. The scoring system is tacked on and, in my opinion, quite poor but easily fixable. I liked the activity a lot, but it's not something I could see playing often. And if you're really good at spatial relations, nobody will play it with you.

Louis XIV: The first in a new mid-box line from Alea, this looks like a winner to me. Experienced players will easily get this down in under an hour and will not leave the table hungry.

Last night I played two games in which my self-calculated expected odds of winning are greater than 50%. Both games contain subtleties that new players often miss, and which experienced players can leverage to their benefit. History has shown I'm extremely good at doing so in these games. In Stephensons Rocket all three opponents were first-time players. I came in fourth. And not even a close fourth, but dead last. It'd be convenient to blame my finish on the unexpected plays of opponents. I shouldn't call them bad plays, because all those opponents finished ahead of me so how bad could they have been? But in some cases, they were certainly bad. A player could have merged a train and effectively forced an opponent to give up enough shares to give the moving player a majority at the merge, but he didn't. Any experienced player would have. I expected him to do so, based my turn on that expectation. When it didn't happen, I was left in an unexpected position. I should have adapted to the style of play that was in evidence, but instead I clung to my dogma and got squished like a little bug.

Santa Fe Rails, in contrast, was played against two experienced players. We play with a house rule that you may not redraw a 2x card following a turn in which you play one, a rule that improves the game dramatically. Don't play without it. There's a big luck factor in Santa Fe, especially in the later turns when it's far better to be lucky than good. That luck factor can decide the winner. Even so, I'd handicap myself as being the runaway favorite to win any game of Santa Fe I'm in. This isn't boasting. Historical data-- from Gathering tournaments and pick-up games to local games in multiple groups-- bears me out. I see and plan many turns ahead. I manage my hand effectively. I grok Santa Fe. Consequently, I win a disproportionate percentage of the time. Last night was no exception. I had good cards, but in the late game while my opponents pulled lucky draws I got garbage. My good cards came earlier, which meant I played fewer special cards and got more cities onto the table-- far more I usually do. We were all roughly even on cash by the end, so being more focused in the early game and having more cities in play swung things in my favor. Santa Fe Rails is a terrific game that deserves greater esteem than it seems to enjoy today.

Last night we finally got around to bringing Victory and Honor to the table. The designer of the game had kindly sent me a prototype a couple of years ago which we'd played a few times, and we'd all liked the game quite a bit. But it hadn't been pulled out in a while, so I was a bit rusty on the rules. No big deal-- I remembered the gist, so it would be a breeze to skim the published rules and teach the game.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

I like everyone involved with this product-- Jim Dietz, Frank Branham, Ty Douds-- all great people. But the rules for Victory and Honor are a nightmare. They read like someone squandered a DeLorean on a trip back to 1980 just to hire someone from Avalon Hill to convolute their rules.

The rules go to great lengths to define meaningless but thematic terms. The cards you collect are Spoils of War. Playing cards face-down is Sacrificing. Cavalry performs a "flanking maneuver." And so on. It's a freakin' trick-taking card game. The rules work far too hard to dress it up in military clothing. The liberal use of special terms winds up obfuscating rather than clarifying. Sacrifices, you see, always lose-- unless they're trump, in which case they win. Not much of a sacrifice, then, is it? Terms are defined before we know how to apply them. The rules tell us what to do with our won cards (Spoils of War) long, long before they tell us how to actually win them. I thought I'd missed something or skipped a section. The rules describe exceptions to the normal rules of play (such as for turn order) before they tell you the normal rules of play. Here's a great example. Rules for "End of Phase" include the line, "The general rules of play are still observed," before the general rules of play are described. This higgledy-piggledy order makes the rules a maze of twisty little passages, all alike-- impossible to navigate or learn from.

I practically threw the rule book across the room three times while explaining the rules. It took us MUCH longer than it should have to get going. The rule book actually stood in the way of us having a good time. Our initial enthusiasm was much dampened by the time we actually began play. Writing good, clear rules is not easy. Rule books are often one of the last things completed in the production of a game, sometimes going to print without being tested. Bad Idea. Publishers, please take the time to blind playtest your rules with multiple groups who have not played your game. Your players will thank you.

Last night's sessions were noteworthy enough to report on.

For Ticket to Ride: Mystery Train we had five players. I went first and kept two tickets: Duluth-Houston and Sault St. Marie-Oklahoma City, which overlap. I then decided to try something I hadn't tried before, and immediately drew more tickets. I got the Station Manager, an expansion card that offers a 10 point bonus for connecting to the most cities by the end of the game with no penalty for failure, so I kept that. I also drew Seattle-New York, one of the game's biggest tickets. Since a number of juicy 6-routes can be used to complete this route, I kept it.

Before long everything went fubar. Michael adopted his frequent approach of grabbing 6-routes, claiming Seattle-Helena and Helena-Duluth. Meanwhile, a party broke out in the Great Lakes as all three other players began snapping up routes in that region like hotcakes. The unexpected crowding of that section of the board created a bit of a panic. Through all of this I'd been collecting cards, trying to put together some kind of viable route across the north. Then Mark poached the Sault St. Marie-Duluth connection I'd been counting on, but which I'd foolishly left vacant. That oversight ultimately cost me the Duluth-Houston ticket. A frenzied westward rush ensued, as two of us tried to connect to the Pacific Northwest while another built north from L.A. and angled for a route east.

I've never seen a Ticket to Ride game with as much unintentional hosage as we had here. I spent the entire game tensed up, trying to keep my route options as open as possible while securing what legs I could in my desperate bid to claim my big ticket. I finally managed a tortuous route: NY-Montreal-Toronto-Sault St. Marie-Winnipeg-Helena-Denver-Salt Lake City-Portland-Seattle, with a Seattle-Calgary leg thrown in for good measure (meant to connect back to Winnipeg, but thwarted immediately upon claiming it-- rendering that leg utterly useless to me except insomuch as it also hosed two opponents). Against all expectations, instead of connecting Sault St. Marie to Oklahoma City via the double-wide wild N-S run, I took the long way around and connected from Denver. I managed to snag the longest route by one train, offsetting my missed ticket, and nabbed the Station Agent bonus with my last singleton play to win by a slim margin over Michael.

There was much more ticket-drawing in this game, partly due to curiosity about the expansion tickets and partly because people got so hosed early on that they were desperate for salvation. I loved the tension in this game, and wonder if future plays would be enhanced by forcing everyone's first turn to be a ticket draw. The game experience is dramatically different when you've got difficult goals to attain. The dismay everyone felt as the board snarled up was fantastic, forcing us to improvise and find alternate solutions. Great stuff, and if the game was always like this I'd be playing it much more.

We gained a sixth player for Big Boss and saw something new: when the deck ran out, Mark was down to only three cards and had to pass. He had thirteen shares of stock (average is ~9) and a flag, and his shares were in pretty good companies-- so if nothing became a cash cow at 50 and his passing was therefore not as big a handicap, he looked to be a contender. As it turned out, a couple of us held most of the confining cards as long as possible, so in the end only two companies merged and the most valuable was worth 40. Despite his five or six passed turns Mark seemed in the running. Unusually for Big Boss, nobody was the obvious runaway leader. Sensing that scores would be close, we decided to count off our cash instead of simply announcing. Everyone took their cash in hand and counted off 100. Then another 100. Then another. Then 50. Then 10, etc. until the player's cash ran out and they declared their total. Mark was the 2nd player out at ~350. At 390 Damon dropped out with 389, leaving just me and Nate. I slapped down a 5, Nate did the same. I added a 1, and Nate matched. Then I grimaced and held up my empty hands-- I was out. Nate laughed and opened his hand, showing me... air. He was out, too-- we tied at 396! An amazing finish, with incredibly tight scores. In fact, as my last play I merged Panthera and Solitude and decided to assign the merging block to Panthera, since I had only one share of the Solitude. I almost went the other way anyway, to make the accounting easier and have Solitude pay out at 10 instead of 9. But Nate had four Solitude, and had I gone for the lazy accounting Nate would have won by three bucks! As with Ticket to Ride, this was a tense game. The drama of the slow reveal of the final tally was terrific.

Eric Hautemont of Days of Wonder swung through town yesterday, giving me a chance to play a prototype of their upcoming Ticket to Ride: Europe. I liked what I saw. While the original game will be more appealing to families and casual players, the Europe map offers tenser, more strategic gameplay. The single biggest improvement is in the structure of the map itself, which offers very few long routes. This puts more focus on the tickets and route planning, rather than the unsatisfying but often successful "grab as many 6-routes as possible" approach. The tickets are also distributed differently: everyone gets 1 long and 3 short tickets at the start of the game (from which 2-4 are kept), and the rest of the deck contains only short tickets. This makes drawing tickets less of a gamble and therefore more viable. Players can now play stations on cities to let them share an opponent's route leading out of that city, but doing so costs you four points, 1-3 cards, and an entire turn. It's an option of last resort, but it's great to have the safety net to fall back on. Some routes require a wild card, so people will be taking them from the display more often.

The least successful new element are tunnels. When claiming a tunnel, three cards are flipped up from the top of the deck. For each one that matches the color used to claim the route (wilds always match), the claiming player must pay an addition card of that type. If they can't or won't pay, they don't get the route. They take back the cards they used, but their turn ends. This random element seems out of place in this version of the game, but would be more welcome in the standard game for some of those long routes in the north and south.

Ticket to Ride: Europe will use full-size cards instead of the original half-size ones. I suppose people think these are easier to shuffle, but I like the smaller cards which take up less table space.

Alan Moon is the Microsoft of game designers. His first versions of products sometimes have problems, but he's very good at working them out over time and evolving them into better incarnations. After one play, Ticket to Ride: Europe appears to address the problems I had with the original game, and I'm now eager to get a copy so I can get it back on the table.

Taught St. Petersburg to my weekly group tonight, and something happened for the first time in... possibly forever. We played three times in a row. Our group simply doesn't do that with anything other than Liar's Dice. Back in the day we might have played two games of Puerto Rico in one night, but I'm not sure we ever tripled up. The novelty of St. Petersburg's newness is certainly a major part of it-- I doubt we'll threepeat again. But the fact that the other players were sufficiently into the game to do so tonight is significant. The first game was extremely close, while the second and third featured more decisive wins (one based on aristocrats, the other on valuable buildings and keeping pace in aristocrats). We ran out all decks but the upgrades in the final game.

I really dug the shaker concept in Zapp Zerapp, but loathed the lame
Parcheesi game it was saddled with.  Igloo Pop shatters the shackles on the shakers and puts them center stage, making for a lighter and more entertaining game.  Now the game's all about matching the shakers to the
proper value (or value range) as quickly as possible.  Fun, frantic, fast, and fluffy-- fabulous! A great closer.

Played my fourth game of Power Grid last night. On the whole this is an improvement over the original Funkenschlag, with snazzier art, shorter playing time, and less fussiness thanks to the elimination of route-drawing. Last night I won on the turn the Phase 3 card appeared, and in the previous game I made a massive push in the western US and won the game in Phase 2. I'm beginning to wonder if Phase 3 doesn't come along a bit too late, or if the payout schedule is too generous. Granted, last night I was exceptionally disciplined (and lucky) in acquiring plants-- after my initial plant (the 4), everything I bought was a keeper. I was particularly fortunate in that when I bought my second plant I passed on the 22 (3 wind power) expecting to get the 25 (4 power for 1 uranium) at cost, since I was the last remaining bidder. The 20 came up instead (5 power for 3 coal), which I cheerfully took. That put me in a sweet position, and I lead from the front of the pack for the rest of the game. Part of the blame goes to the relative inexperience of other players who didn't bid up my later two plants enough. In particular, I snagged the... 32? (6 power for 3 oil) at a time when oil was dirt cheap and lots of low plants were still unaccounted for. Sure enough, a low plant came up and clogged the market, delaying the availability of good plants for quite some time. I think some of the other players had their eyes on "better" plants coming up in the futures market, and failed to appreciate the risk that those plants wouldn't become available at all. Consequently I got the plant I wanted for a song, and cruised to an easy win.

Is this kind of experience a virtue of the game or a flaw? The most expedient remedy would be to adjust the payout table to something closer to the original's, in which returns for each additional powered city diminish rapidly. This reduces the incentive to take the lead, and reduces the amount of money in the game (further reducing the build rate, extending the game for more turns and giving players who don't get a crack at good plants a better chance to come back). On the other hand, having the game end earlier is not necessarily a bad thing. Once players understand the importance of good plants, their price should rise to something closer to their true value and the game becomes self-correcting. There's still the chance the the last player left in the auction will luck into a great plant at cost, but that's also one of the reasons players jockey for last position.

Regardless, I really enjoy the game and am happy to have it in a form that's more palatable to the rest of my game group, who found Funkenschlag distasteful on aesthetic and functional grounds. The solution to my concerns may just be player education, and with this new edition I may be able to get my group to play enough to achieve enlightenment.

The latest from Alan Moon and Days of Wonder, Ticket To Ride, arrived just in time for game night. In a rarity for us, we played it twice-- the second time later in the evening after playing other games in the interim. This bodes well for the game-- all players considered it a "buy"-- but I have some concerns.

In game #1, all players focused on their own goals. We often noted opportunities to hose other players, but invariably chose to stay on target and pursue our own ends. In game #2, we decided to play a bit more defensively and actively blocked players when the opportunity arose. In all cases, this never worked-- the players were able to build around the blockade because it wasn't compelling enough for the other players to continue to block, thereby sacrificing their own tempo and putting their own ambitions in jeopardy. Frankly, this concerns me because it means the game becomes a multiplayer solitaire. Like crayon rail games, there's virtually no interaction. The game would be far more interesting if players were brought into more conflict.

I'm also concerned that collecting large sets and going for 15-point plays may be a stronger strategy than completing tickets. Being forced to start with 2 tickets only means some players get lucky out of the gate and others are saddled with obligations that will drive much of their game.

On the plus side, despite these concerns I'm still interested in exploring the game more. It'll undoubtedly come out this Friday and again next Tuesday. We'll see how my opinion evolves by then.

Taught Princes of the Renaissance to 5 new players last night. The game took about 2.5 hours to play, and not only didn't anyone complain, but everyone really liked the game and is eager to play again. Yay! Now that everyone knows what's what, I'd expect to be able to cut that to under 2 hours next time. I won by a very slim margin with an offensive army strategy (5 laurels), two 10-point city tiles, and a minority cash bonus. Nate's close second was from a bunch of artists and 4 good city tiles. Two other players were serious military players, and another dabbled. The Merchant events got split and were therefore not a major factor. I think victory was within reach of a number of players near the end.

I thought the six-player game was much more balanced than with four. Players investing in military force have to spend their turns declaring wars if they want to get a return on their investment, which means they're not choosing tiles to auction or buying treachery-- a good thing for balance. Non-military players seemed able to force the end of the decade more readily, since there are likely to be more than one of them.

After three games, I've yet to see any major interest in the green or purple tiles, which seem underpowered. Militants gravitate toward the blue tiles, and since those tiles are held by fighters blue tends to rise to the top of the status ladder. And yet again, the Pope languished unauctioned for most of the game. Is my experience anomalous, or is it consistent with other groups?

Last night was also my first play of New England since The Gathering, and I spent most of the game befuddled. I had no good sense for what was valuable, what was rare, and what to focus on. I can see that knowing the distribution of scoring cards is very important, and I'm hopeful that the next time I play I'll be able to do so more intelligently. But overall New England seemed rather underwhelming.

I've been trying to put my finger on why, and I think part of it might be because the cards and tiles you're drafting are very samey and not particularly exciting. There are only 3 kinds of tiles, and it's hard to shake the sense that if you don't get a green this time there are plenty more where it came from. I know that timing can be critical to avoid getting blocked, but there's very little satisfaction gained in placing a tile on the board. The pilgrim/ship competition is more visceral, but is only one aspect of the larger game. I like the bidding system, but there just never seemed to be anything that was really worth bidding a lot on. New England lacks drama. The fault could lie with the players-- we may just not have twigged to the subtleties of the game yet. But I'm pretty good at sensing that kind of thing, and it didn't feel like there's much there there. Am I alone here? Can someone testify?

Got a chance to try Uwe Rosenberg's latest, Yellowstone Park, last night with 5 players. I was not impressed. This is an egregious example of an abstract game with a superfluous, tacked-on theme-- the game has even less a connection with Yellowstone Park than Yogi Bear has with baseball. The game involves playing cards on a 7x7 grid. The number of the card dictates the row in which it must be played, while the color more or less dictates the column. Whenever you play a card, you must then define a 3x3 grid containing that card and collect all cards from the board which are outside that grid. Ideally, that'll be 0 since collected cards count against you. You can improve your score by drawing from your collected cards or finishing a 3x3 grid, but you luck into them more than plan for them. There's precious little scope for strategic decisions-- you just have to play the hand you're dealt. It's light and moves quickly, but there's no "there" there. It fails the "Will I ever suggest playing this game?" test, which makes it a no-buy for me.

I recently had the chance to play R&R Games' newest party games, both of which get a big thumbs up.

Smarty Party from Aaron Weissblum and Pitt Crandlemire is a game of lists. As play proceeds around the table, each player must name an item from a given list ("Monopoly properties between Go to Jail and Go", "Most spoken languages", etc). Failure earns a penalty chip, success the "smarty pants". When the list is exhausted or the chips are gone, the player with the smarty pants can ditch a chip and then everyone cashes in their chips for board advancement-- an undesirable thing, since the least-advanced player wins. There are some nice self-balancing touches, play moves briskly, and fun is had. After two plays I have minor concerns about the writing/editing on the lists. Many would benefit from an "as of Jan 2003" (or whatever) clarification or more precise wording (does "Popular dog breeds" mean the MOST popular dog breeds, or just a random set of popular ones?). We were stunned that "United States" was not on the list of "Major powers of World War I." And so on. The people stung by these problems felt... well, stung-- which can sour the game experience. My hope is that these are exceptions rather than the rule.

Thingamajig, also from Mr. Weissblum, is destined for big things. The thingamajig itself is a simple gizmo which, when you push a button, shows a word on a dot-matrix LCD display. Very legible, very easy. Gameplay is a model of simplicity. Get a word from the gizmo and offer up any clue you like. All other players write down their guess at the word, and collect a chip if they're correct. The cluegiver also gets a chip for each player who gets it right-- unless everyone does, in which case the cluegiver gets zilch. When the chips are gone, the player with the most of 'em wins. I love games (especially word games) that reward creativity, and this is prime specimen. Plus, there are any number of other uses for the thingamajig (Password, anyone?). My only quibble is that after a few seconds the gizmo shuts off and the word vanishes, and there's no way to prevent that or get the word back. Fortunately this shouldn't make a difference most of the time, but it might make some applications of the gizmo more difficult. Regardless, a no-brainer purchase.

My turn as game czar this week, and I chose Kings & Things-- a game I played often in college, but almost never since. I have the original English edition, acquired long ago. All 3 other players were new. We only played through about 4 turns-- long enough for me to acquire a Citadel. Nate could have built one too, but a 5th player had arrived and we decided to move on to something else. It's a game that definitely shows its age and origins. Combat via die rolls, lots of fiddly bits, lots of rule exceptions. And yet it still works for me. It's got just the right level of randomness and whimsy. It can also be a long game if played to its conclusion, which is another reason it's faded with time. One event is particularly noteworthy. Damon started the game with amazingly good creatures, mostly desert and frozen waste dwellers (he had both terrains). Feeling confident, he attacked my Arch Cleric and assorted other creatures with a massive stack of 5 magic creatures valued 2-5 and a normal 4 and 5. It was absurd. By all rights, he should have stomped me. But I played the anti-magic scroll, causing all his magic creatures to fight as normal, and letting my magic critters get in the first punch. That completely turned the tide and he wound up decimated-- and possibly soured on the game as a whole-- instead. That kind of thing can happen in Kings & Things. Nate liked it, though, so perhaps we'll be able to bring it back to the table soon.

Mü: I keep forgetting how much fun this game is. We don't play card games nearly enough around here. This one has a learning curve, too, so we need to play it again soon before the memory fades into mist. I couldn't get a good hand to save my life, so there was little I could do but contribute to a Mü first for me-- a game where 2 players deliberately sacrificed themselves in consecutive hands at the end of the game to prevent the hand from being played. Bizarre.

Tichu: Having got the card game jones, I flexed the power of czardom by bringing this out when Damon's departure left us with 4. We split up the two experienced players. Nate and I were on fire, calling and making Tichu every hand. In one memorable hand, I was dealt the blue 9-K bomb and was passed the blue A by my partner, who held the blue 4-8 bomb. Meanwhile, our opponents had a 2 bomb and a 3 bomb! Mü's my favorite 5-player card game, and Tichu's the one for 4. But I think Michael and I are the only ones in my group to feel the love.

Wildlife Adventure: Down to 3 players now, and that's the perfect number for this game. With more it becomes too chaotic, but with 3 there's actually quite a lot of strategy involved. I'll have to remember to bring this out more when we're 3-handed.

Our Tuesday group had fallen into a bit of a rut, in which various vetoes made it difficult to get anything to the table. So we decided to crown a different person Despot for the Day each week, giving them full authority to choose the games for the evening and giving everyone else the duty to grin and play them. So far it's working out well, and this week was Nate's turn-- which meant party games up front.

Times to Remember: This Richard Borg design circa 1991 could use an update to bring it into the new millenium. Teams must identify the year in which a particular event occurred, using plastic windows covering anywhere from 1 to 7 years on a cardboard disc. The first team to get rid of all of their windows wins the game. Pretty much the only way I got anything right was if the event happened to occur while I was in high school, in which case I could narrow it down to a 4-year window. Jake and Kara, meanwhile, weren't even alive for many of these events-- and the fun of the game is really in correlating the given events to your own personal timeline. If your timeline hadn't even existed yet, it's just trivia and not particularly interesting.

Face to Face: I wasn't crazy about the game when I reviewed it way back in 1994, and now that the pictures are even more dated, it certainly hasn't improved. The underlying concept of identifying pictures by revealing only part of them at a time is solid, but the framework around it here is tedious. This wants to be played on a video screen, not with tiny plastic viewing gizmos.

Epic Duels: Another pair of 6-player light vs. dark last-team-standing brawls. We tried the suggestion I came up with after our last outing, allowing everyone to draw a card at the end of their turn to increase card flow. This worked very well, keeping the game more fluid and making it less likely for someone to stall with nothing to do for long periods of time. It affects the balance a bit, strengthening some characters a tad (Mace) and weakening others (Emperor Palpatine), but overall it's a keeper for 6-player matches. The game was fun and though the good guys triumphed easily in the Emperor's throne room, the Dark Side prevailed in a nail-biting rematch in the arena from Episode II. A simple, fun system that could be rethemed in myriad ways (it screams for a superhero edition). I need to swing by Toys 'R Us this weekend and nab a copy.

We started with a three player game of Keythedral, with all building tiles face up from the outset. This was in direct response to an earlier game in which I'd traded for a gold, got the 4 tile that needed a gold substituted out from under me, and then had none of the 5 tiles need a gold-- effectively putting me out of the game. Like the previous game, this one also came down to whoever bought the last 5 tile. It should have been me, even with the price being made one cube more expensive, but I forgot to play a card during the production phase which would have turned all my rock into water and so I was one blue cube short. Nate picked up the tile and the win. The game worked quite well with 3, although there wasn't much in the way of bidding for start player, and I'll play it with the building tiles face-up from now on as it allowed for better long-term planning. I'd also be happier if we could get rid of the chaos created by the laws, but I like the incentive they provide for dropping out of the action phase early. I'll have to think on that.

Star Wars: Epic Duels: First play for all six of us. We played a 3 on 3 team game-- to win you had to kill all of the opposing team's characters. The system is light, simple, and proved to be quite fun. A good deal of the fun came from the license. If we didn't already have emotional investments in the Star Wars characters, the game would likely have fallen flat. Instead, there was much fun to be had in Wookie growls, Yodaspeak, film quotes, and the like. Two actions per turn felt a bit restrictive-- if we play again with 6, I'll suggest each player gets to draw a card at the end of his turn to help with card flow, which was otherwise slowing the game down. I somehow missed this when it was on clearance-- I've never even seen it in stores-- but wouldn't mind adding it to my collection on the cheap.

The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game: It's been a few years since Really Nasty got table time, but it seemed like the right choice to follow the beer 'n' pretzels mood established by Epic Duels. This is still a sumptuous game, with enormous board, big plastic horses, and stand-up, dry-erase tote board for the odds. Some truly great drama in the races, with clutch die rolls making a difference and a successful Objection following a failed Steward's Enquiry causing only 1 horse to finish the 5th race. As usual, it came down to wagering in the final race when those trailing bet the farm. Four of us hit, having all bet on Blue, and Nate's larger bankroll coming into the race (and larger resulting wager) carried the day. I ended the game with 2 of 3 cards unplayed, having had no opportunity whatsoever to play them (although the Laurels and Briars Brook were popular grazing grounds, nobody ever landed on The Beeches or Willow's Corner)-- which is kind of a drag. The whole point of Really Nasty is being really nasty, and not having the cards to do so takes some of the fun out of the experience. Still it was the right game at the right time.

Paris, Paris: First "real" game, after one or two plays on BSW. Still haven't made up my mind as to whether there's any "there" there. The order of the tile draws is overwhelmingly important, perhaps more so than any other factor. The scoring feels arcane and a step removed from the action, making it a difficult game to get involved with. Still interested in further play, but I'm confident there's less meat here than in Schacht's other game of similar form, Web of Power.

Carcassonne: Traders and Builders: Really enjoyed this. Hadn't played Carcassonne in quite some time, and his expansion did a lot of nice things to improve gameplay. I liked the incentives, in the form of goods tokens, for players to close off opponents' cities. I liked the extra-turn mechanic of the builder, especially when used with roads. The pig is largely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things and seems ripe for a variant rule. Bottom line is that I really enjoyed this game, and hope to put Carcassonne (with both expansions) back into regular rotation again.

Mogul: I've had this little bidding game for months, but only just got around to trying it. Very clever. I liked the simple but effective bidding system. It felt like brown cards might be too strong. Since everyone starts with one, they're quite valuable out of the gate and it's well worth shooting your wad to buy more if they appear before any are sold. Three came up in a row to start our game, giving the first player to sell them (me) a commanding lead that was never overtaken. Perhaps this was an anomaly, however-- I look forward to finding out in future plays.

Wildlife Adventure: This game is often dismissed as having little strategy, and it can certainly be played that way. But it doesn't have to be. In this game, three players got down to holding just a single card each, but no travel vouchers (most of Asia got bypassed, and a lot of vouchers were spent trading animals). I had three cards left, but lots of vouchers. I had earlier dead-ended red, and blue wasn't in much better shape. That left yellow. Through the use of obstacles, I was able to control where yellow went. Even though Nate correctly surmised that my final animal was the blue whale, he and the other players were powerless to keep yellow away from it. I ultimately used vouchers to build a parallel route to get there and win. Running out of vouchers is a bad thing, kids.

Settlers of the Stone Age: German version, but this should be functionally identical to the English. Hanno (3rd seat) and I (2nd seat) ran away with it, bouncing the 2-point event bonus back and forth until Hanno locked it up with 9 chits. I ultimately won the other 2-point bonus to win the game. Michael felt out of it from very early on. Nate fared better, but said he also felt out of it (from where I sat, I thought he could have made a run for it). An incredible run of 8s (which for a while gave me 3 resources) and shortage of 6s definitely helped my cause. Bone seemed to be in short supply for much of the game, and it was certainly my limiting factor. Note to self: more bone next time.

With only four kinds of resources instead of five, and no road network needed to build new "settlements", Stone Age seems far more forgiving to me than normal Settlers. If your situation is bad, find a spot that helps you, send a nomad there, and make yourself a tribe. It certainly helps to be an explorer-- that way, when deserts appear, you can control where they go. I played the first few in this game and never had to nuke a hex touched by one of my tribes. I can see how this might create a poor-get-poorer problem (an interesting inversion of the classic Settlers criticism), but it might also mean there's a powerful incentive to explore in the early game rather than create new tribes. More play definitely needed, but I think this is a strong entry in the Settlers series.

The English translation we played from was unclear as to whether or not advancing on the red track entitled you to steal a resource when you move the Neanderthal or Carnivore, but the online tutorial makes it clear that it does. We played that it didn't, but I don't think that made a big difference overall.

Our five player game clocked in at about four hours last night, including some rules explanation for a newbie, but I never noticed the time. You'll find no higher praise from me about a long game. I've played Funkenschlag about half a dozen times, which is surprising considering the depths of my disdain for the crayon rail series from which it descends. Funkenschlag succeeds because it is not solely about constructing a rail (well, power line) network-- it's about money management. This is a game of inches, where every dollar matters. Driving prices up on the resource market is not a mere token gesture-- it can mean the difference between someone reaching another city now or later. Or at all. You've got to grab good power plants when they become available-- which of course means recognizing what's good and what's not-- because better ones might not come along for a long time and getting stuck in a power plant crunch is a bad thing. There's a lot going on, and there's always something new to think about.

In last night's game, Michelle had a sweet uranium monopoly with three uranium plants, guaranteeing her full power to 11 cities for just 6 bucks for much of the game. The highest numbered owned plant was the 33 until the last turn or two. Mark had a chance to close out the game by building to 18 cities even though he could only power 15, but he came up short on cash. I upgraded next turn to be able to power 16 cities, making him decide not to build. Phase 3 kicked in for the following turn, which let everyone upgrade to 18 or 19 capacity and proved my undoing-- I had to follow suit, even though it left me with insufficient funds to build to 18. Mark and Dave wound up tying at 18, and Dave had 16 more bucks left over. An unexpected finish, considering Dave had taken a chance the turn before, auctioning and getting stuck with an undesired plant only to see a high capacity plant turn up in its place. Phase 3 started a bit late for my liking-- it only lasted one turn, so we never really got to play with all the juicy, powerful plants. But this seems to be the norm with 5 players-- for a longer game, you need fewer people.

Five of us tried out Days of Wonder's Fist of Dragonstones this weekend. As we've come to expect from Bruno Faidutti (with Michael Schacht this time), there are lots of special characters with special abilities. In fact, those abilities are the entire game. Each round is a batch of in-your-fist auctions for the right to execute a character's ability. Auction, auction, auction. And it's the most unforgiving form of auction-- all players pay their bid, even if they lose. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Since players have a budget of coins which get returned to them every few auctions, spent bids aren't gone for good. This lessens the blow and actually makes the bidding far more strategic than it might otherwise be. There's quite a bit of group-think involved. When a terrific ability comes up for auction, everyone might think it's going to go for a huge sum and therefore not bid-- allowing one player to walk away with it for a minimum bid of 1. Success relies on judging what's going to be valuable to other players and how your opponents will react, and acting accordingly.

Our game moved briskly and did not overstay its welcome-- important for a game where you do the same one thing over and over and over again. The components are first-rate, making me very interested in seeing future efforts from Days of Wonder. This'll probably come back to the table tomorrow night, and I'm looking forward to giving it a second play.

We had four players last night and tried a bunch of new games before closing with our now almost-required-by-law game of Puerto Rico. Here's the detailed report.

Tried Cannes for the first time last night, with 3 players, and was quite disappointed. I was utterly bored for much of the game, as there was simply nothing to do. The basic yellow goods were available in large quantities, but for at least half the game there were no green tiles in play for converting the yellow stuff into green stuff. Without green stuff you can't make movies, and if you can't make movies there's no point in playing the movie production tiles. Consequently they didn't appear until very late. Only two movies were produced in the entire game, both by the same player (me), as the game ended just when production seemed to become possible. There are simply too few conversion tiles in Cannes. It takes forever for them to come out, and then it can be ages before you're able to connect to them. So much of the game is spend jockeying in anticipation of something happening, which might not even happen for a long time. I very rarely say this about a game, but the end was a relief-- I couldn't wait for boredom to be over so we could move on to something fun. Direct to the trade pile.

We followed up with two 4-player games of Puerto Rico. Since its release last April, we've played PR every Tuesday (often more than once) with only 2 exceptions. We didn't think it possible, but it's eclipsed Big Boss as the warm, fuzzy blanket. The expansion buildings have certainly helped, since the strategies change now with every game. Game 1 saw our first true exploitation of the Union Hall, as both Nate and I grabbed it and a small warehouse. Nate had a virtual monopoly on indigo and managed to get about 9 indigo at once time, holding onto them for multiple turns to generate easy VPs. I had only 3 corn, 3 tobacco, and 1 sugar, but nevertheless managed 5 Union Hall VPs each captain phase and often more by shipping. By the time we were done, I had 45 VP chits and the Customs House, for a total of 76 points. Nate finished a good 15-20 behind that for second.

Game 2 I went a different way and got both the Hacienda and Forest House, nabbing 3 quarries, 4 forests, and the only coffee. While two other players built up Aquaduct production, I focused on building. With 3 large buildings (only 2 manned), I shut down the game before they could really get their shipping plan into gear and won by 10. I suspect, like the Office and Trading Post, the Hacienda and Forest House should be disallowed in the same game. It's extremely difficult to defend against a player who builds both. You simply can't ship fast enough, and you can't outbuild him.