2006 Year End Summary

The year 2006 is going to be a page of history in about 5 minutes. It's a good time to summarize my gaming life in 2006.

Several remarkable works have been committed or initiated in the late 2006. Firstly, I learnt how to write game logs to record and to assess games played. Started on 31 October 2006, even started on BGG to log games played. 235 plays have been logged so far, which 106 plays in December, and 126 plays in Novement, plus 3 plays on 31 October. More monumentally, my game collection was started to be organized on BGG. 116 games have been cataloged in the previous two months. 300+ games are still pending to be cataloged. At the same time, I have given my ratings to 96 games and comments to 100 games. The progress seems not bad. I believe the numbers will be kept growing in 2007.

Apart from the activities on BGG, it is definitely worthwhile to mention the creation of this blog. Less one month time, more than a dozen posts have been published here. As a person who seldom writes, I am pretty satisfied by this. Keep go on in 2007.

About time to start a countdown to enter 2007, wish you all have a happy new year.

Top Games of 2006 in National Games Week

National Games Week 2006 was an interesting nation-wide event in the US, organized by a boardgame enthusiast. Participants joined the event by holding game gathering and demostration at various public places in their respective local communities during the same week, and then submitted their post-event reports to the central organizer. This event seems to good enough noise and to draw growing attention as many big game publishers have sponsored the event.

Lately, they have tallied and generated a list of 100 games which were most played during the week. The list depicts the current gaming trend in the US. The list includes designer games, RPGs, miniature games, collectible card games, mind games, and mass market family games. Most of them are not strange to me. And I own one-third of the games listed.

Site Copyright Notice Added

A piece of notice has been added to the footer of the site. It contains a disclaimar about the use of external resources found in public domain and their respective copyrights. If you spot any misuse of materials, please let me know.

There is also another note declaring all my creation on this site are copyrighted by myself. I am going to restrict the reference of contents found on this site. I just want to defend on the intellectual property rights. I am so pleased to grant permission for those who are interested to reference my contents.

Table Game Complex 2006 - Day 2

This is the day 2 of the event today. I attended the event with Pong. The attendees were of older age group than those yesterday. More seconardary school students participated, particularly the Gundam and Yu-Gi-Oh TCGs (tradable card games) competitions. There were also more visitors on Saturday today as opposed a weekday yesterday.

Mabel (my friend who is running a responsible local magazine for kids) visited me today. She planned to listen to my seminar today. However, the seminar was cancelled due to the same reason as yesterday. I then guided her to visit every booth and answered her questions about various games. She also got a chance to play a light game Galloping Pigs. Besides she also witnessed a rather young kid (11 years old) who won several games on Coda (a very good mind game) against other older players (about 20 years old). After that, Mabel requested to have a look about the materials I prepared for the presentation. It gave me a chance to host a private seminar for her. Charles (the organizer) also joined to listen to it. There were far too more materials than I would suppose to talk in the seminar. I was planning to selective skip something which audience might find less interested. At last, I spent two hours something to go through all the materials. Mabel seemed to be well fed. She was enlighted about games with new viewpoints, and suggested that the materials should be good enough to fill a book. COOL, I may be able to be a book author, which have been my dream since my studenthood.

After the long private presentation, it almost reached the closing hour for the event. I could see that some visitors (including girls, yeah) were drawn to play games at our booth. Pong told me that the visitors quite enjoyed our light games, particularly Bug Bluff and Coda. The silly simplistic dice game, "Easy Come, Easy Go", was quite successful too. It drew good crow to have an enjoyable game play. Do not under-estimate the power of silly-bearing games.

Though there were about 200-300 visitors throughout the two-day event, it was not a success generally due to the short of attractive event items, the arrangement and promotion. On the other hand, it was definitely a good attempt to host an event at this scale. If more event tracks and highlights would be incorporated, it should offer better experience. Hope that they will consider running it again the next year, and make a bigger success. If so, I will try to provide them more advice on how to improve it. Good Luck.

Table Game Complex 2006 - Day 1

Table Game Complex is an organization found by a group of gamers who were students graduated in the PolyU in Hong Kong. I acquainted them in the 4-th quarter this year. It was a bit excited to hear their project on holding a game fair by the end of this year. I keep having such ambition to found a similar game convention in Hong Kong, one day. However, I am uncomfortable with my ability yet. It will take me 5 or 10 more years to go before I can realize a good timing and a good plan to execute it.

This 2-day game fair is named as Table Game Complex 2006 and started on 29 December. There are some CCG (collectible card games) tournaments and game demostrations. I was invited to participate the event to deliver speeches about games, and to do demostrations on some good approachable games.

I have spent many hours working overnight last night to prepare materials for my presentation. But I was a bit disappointed by the poor attendence and the unexpectedly young age group, and therefore got to cancell my seminar. Instead, I have introduced and hosted several games which were new to other gamers (To find out which games I introduced, you may visit my BGG profile and to check out the record of games played on this day). These games are usualy very easily to be picked up by any players, and are more fun to make it addictive. There are strategic options found in these games but never overloaded. All and all, these games can often draw crowds to watch the progress, because of their visual appearance or the noise from playing them. Generally, I would say these games are usually better for drawing laymen to games than those highly rated strategic games.

This is my site report of this event on day 1.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci is an ingenious person which I am pretty curious about his life. A strategic game of his name was released one month ago. My attention was caught by certain ideas from this game, which somewhat coincide to what I have been working on my own design sphere. I bought it, and gave it a trial.

I am fond of the theme and mechanism. However, I would say the rulebook is poorly presented. Got confused by several rules in the first game. We kept updating our ruleset to continue our first game. The good news was that we found the game getting better, and even better. Though we did not finish our first game, we already discovered and assured multiple diverse but playable strategies. One unobvious extreme startegy, which sticked with low expenditure, worked like other aggressive ones.

After the first game, we all agreed that the game was a deep one. I checked out all the designer rules and review the rulebook. Sorted out those rule errors. We love to play it again, with the proper rules.

Standardizing Naming of Tags

In order to have a better organization and to facilate searching and browsing my posts in long run, I have standardized the naming of tags associated to the posts.

bgg

tagging affairs related to my bgg account.

site:Updates

tagging updates of this blog site.

quote

tagging meaningful quotes.

event

tagging information about various game-related events.

game

tagging information about particular games.

topic

tagging articles with auxillary topics.

spotlight

tagging external materials which I encountered and would like to share.

voice

tagging everything else I speak.

There are sub-tags to finer classifiy the articles. They are pretty comprehensible. You may browse posts by selecting a particular tag names under the Tags section in the left sidebar.

Free Microbadge from BGG

BGG sent all members a Christmas greeting, including me. The most exciting news was that BGG would give me a free microbadge (a small meaningful icon under my avatar) for my user profile. It's so nice. One would usually need to spend some GeekGold in order purchase a mircobadge.

I am still deciding which microbadge I would get. Actually I was looking for one with dice fans graphics, as I am a dice lover. Weirdly, I could not find any microbadge for dice game fans. Quite probably, I will have to prepare an alternative. I will announce which one I would finally get.

Dice Gaming Night

Last night maybe an unusal gaming night. There were only 3 or 2 players at a time. 7 games have been played. Surprisingly, they are all dice games with totally aspects.

• Diceland - Deep White Sea
• Last Chance
• Knights
• Sharp Shooters
• Pickomino
• Cosmic Cows
• Monopoly Express

Diceland - Deep White Sea, is an extraordinary and the most innovative dice game ever. You can throw and shoot other dice with yours, or use the special powers. Dexterity and spatial strategic planning are required to excel in this game. The game balance in this game is appreciated.

Last Chance, is a pretty well-designed dice game. Rolling-for-pattern format is its surface. Bidding and wagering is the actual core, which makes the game a successful party game.

Knights, is a dice ranking game. Making duels is the core that makes fun through challenges and revenges. The acquisition of special cards adds depth to the game.

Sharp Shooters, is unusally a partial pattern matching game, where you may press your luck to try for higher return or pass the opportunity to others. Most decisions are quite intrigue.

Pickomino, is designed around a very clever keep-and-reroll idea to make high pips. Strategis come from hunting and guarding worms for endgame scores. The dominoes of worms are of top touch.

Cosmic Cows, is a surprising simple game which however always makes laughters. You would love to make friends with the cuties cows as well as the standard dice.

Monopoly Express, is a remake of a variant of a classic game. The idea is great as it turns the estates on a game board into eye-catching dice. It's a not silly conversion. The new dice format itself is a very nice twist of press-your-luck dice throwing game. It's often tempting to try for a hotel, but at the end going bankrupt.

It's an unforgettable experience about playing this many number of dice game of so different styles.

Chance Favors the Prepared Mind

I never appreciate people attributing one's inability to luck factors. One should change their attitude towards luck and perhaps overcome something they thought bad about luck.

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

- LouisPasteur, Quoted in H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles, Prindle, Wever and Schmidt, Boston, 1988.

Brainy Days on my GeekBadge

I have been oberseving and digging information from BGG over the year. Until recently, like two months ago, I decided to make use of its tracking feature to organize my game collection and my gaming profile. At the mean time, I started to make contribution to this community than being a mere-taker. Other than posting game images, two game entries which I submitted got approved by the date of this writing. It's fun to identify on the earth and to submit new game entries to this gigantic boardgame database. And my contribution was rewarded with some GeekGold, which works like a rating. Right, I am silly but I like prestige.

The two games added are: Travel 2 Game and Purzelpinne (aka Tumbling Spiders). I bought Travel 2 Game many years ago. I was caught by its description about wordgaming, but it was later rendered a wrong purchase. The game is too simple and too trivial to me. It may be more suitable for kids of 6 years old or younger, during travels with parents. Purzelpinne is on the hand a pretty looking and fun filled game about dexterity. It can be played well by kids as well as adults. The game play is far much exciting and funny than Jenga, because of the adorable spiders and its unstable string-mounted base piece.

On 28 Nov 2006, I purchased myself a GeekBadge for my BGG profile at a cost of 50 GeekGold. I am happy with this badge, which is a badge of custom text attached with my profile. I kept trying different words on the badge to describe myself. It was started with "Prison Break" but now I will use "Brainy Days" for a while, before I can think of a better one.

Home-made 3-D board for Puerto Rico

Looking through the eyes of my friends, I am enthusiastic about gaming. Indeed it's not difficult to find someone else who is more devoted to games. Today, I came across a page showing some work by a South Korean boardgamer. He demostrated a home-made handcrafted 3-D board as an add-on for a renowned boardgame, Puerto Rico. Although the page is all written in Korean, the pictures can desribe the whole story about making this 3-D board. Not only showing the finished work, there are also images of hand sketches and photos of reference landscapes. If you have ever played Puerto Rico, you would know that such game board is not required at all. Nonetheless, such gorgeous handcraft can definite boost up the atmosphere of gaming, and to help you immersing in the game mood. Truely appreciate his devotion to games.

Fig. 1: Normal setup of game board in a regular Puerto Rico game.


Fig. 2: Home-made 3-D game board by a South Korean boardgamer.

Recently Played Games Section is Added

Are you peeking at which games I have recently played? There is no secret. To serve your curiosity, a new top box is added to the site with which a few recently played games are listed. Now you may learn what I usually like to play among my game collection.

Most Significant Games Since 1800

Erik Arneson, the editor of Board and Card Games at About.com, recently compiled his own list of the 50 most historically and culturally significant games published since 1800. The list arose a hot debate among modern boardgamers, because most of them have a very green experience. I have played games for more than 15 years since my childhood. I enjoy a rather diverse range of games and therefore I can share similar viewpoints as Erik. I pretty agree to his list, in particular, talking about cultural impacts.

Among the 50 games, I know well 80%+ of them, and have owned or played 50%+ of them. I am a bit proud to say that it would not be easy find another Hong Kong people who can share the similar diverse exposure.

These games are not necessarily to be great games or best selling ones. However, they did help shaping up the gaming culture. If you are interested in any of these games or want to learn why they are considered significant in history, I am pleased to give you more details.

Random Games Widget Brings First Site Update

Have created this blog for more than a whole year, supposed to collect my thoughts about gaming. It's a shame that nothing has been added to the site so far. Today found a new widget from BGG (www.boardgamegeek.com) which arosed my attention. I have started to manage my game collection online at BGG since late Oct 2006. The widget is a tool to randomly pick some games from my collection and inline them to a webpage. It gave me the motive to make it the first addition to this blog. From now on, you may find some random games listed at the sidebar. I am proud to say they are part of my game collection. And more fun, you can find different picks each time you visit or load this blog.

If you are interested in any of these games, you can simply click on the pictures or the game titles, which bring you to more information about the particulars. Besides, you may also drop me a comment or email if you want to explore more specifics.

If you are curious about my latest try-to-be-full-but-still-partial game collection, you may click on the my collection at the top of My Games section of the sidebar.

So, have fun. Happy Gaming. And I hope frequent updates to this blog will follow in near future.