St. Louis Maroon Knights, FC

One of the amazing things about BoardGameGeek is the number of self-published board games available. It's not surprising (to me) that many serious boardgamers are wanna-be boardgame designers. It's the same as every teenager with a guitar wanting to be a rock star, every English major wanting to write the next great novel and every movie nut believing he's a director.

BoardGameGeek makes it fairly easy for amatuer designers to post their game materials and solicit feedback. I've tried out a few of them. For the most part, these games are fairly rough, but, I suppose you get what you pay for. (One exception that I discovered last year was the very-fun Delve: The Dice Game.)

A couple of weeks ago, Luke Morris (Geek handle Hamster of Fury) emailed those of us who requested it a preliminary version of his game Footy Manager. The game allows one or more players to manage the front office of a soccer (football) club. Unlike other soccer games, such as APBA Soccer or All Time Championship Soccer (another self-published game), the game doesn't focus on the play-by-play of the matches. Players spend about half their time managing the team's roster and about half playing the games. The player's team starts as the lowest-ranked team in the fourth division of a fictional soccer league. Working with a paltry amount of money (and a roster of fictional players), the player tries to win enough games to work his way into promotion. The games themselves are OK, but the real fun is the "role playing" aspect of following your fictional players through their season/careers. It reminds me of following my fictional bomber crew in the 1981 Avalon Hill game B-17: Queen of the Skies or my fictional squad in the 1983 Victory Games game Ambush.

I started a game a couple of weeks ago, but Luke made some (much-needed) changes to the injury charts (and a few other tweaks). So I started anew this afternoon. Here is a short summary of the first few weeks for the St. Louis Maroon Knights FC. (Note that Luke uses British pounds as the game's currency, but I'm using $s instead.)

The marketing deparment was able to land a $2 million sponsorship deal with Barclay's, which gave me enough seed capital to expand our stadium's capacity to 18,000. It's a long way from a Premier League stadium, as only 5,000 of the capacity is seated -- the rest is standing room.

I also hired some staff. Having learned my lesson the first time through, I hired a full medical staff to help with injuries and a youth team coach to help feed new players into the roster for next season. (This is a lot cheaper than trying to buy players off of the transfer list.) I also hired assistant managers and coaches to help with training. This left me with only $1.6 million in the bank.

Speaking of the transfer list, most of the players were far too expensive. Henrik Jacobson, a 32-year-old keeper was available for $5 million from second-divsion club Turin, and first-division club Lyon wanted $3 million for Swiss wingback Thomas Hurlimann. Then I saw that 27-year-old Korean striker Park Lee was available from third-division club Bremen for $1.5 million. Lee was much better than my top strikers, so I drained the bank account to sign him -- putting my 30-year-old striker Jimmy Swales on the transfer list cheap. (I was able to move him to fellow fourth-division club Paris for $75,000.) That left $175,000 in the bank as I headed to Kiev for the first match.

Kiev is ranked 4th (of 8) in the fourth division, so the manager decided to play a 4-5-1 formation and hope for a tie. Attacking middie Johnny Shanks put the Knights up 1-0 in the 68th minute, and Park Lee made it 2-0 in the 81st minute. Kiev scored one in injury time to make it 2-1, but it was too little too late.

The first home match will be next week against Bucharest. In the meantime, I'll need to check the injury report to see who's unavailable. Hopefully a big crowd will show up, because we need the money.

February 2, 2010

A BoardGameGeek user named Tor has posted a nifty computer version of Delve the Dice Game (which I reviewed in a January 24th posting). It's still a work in progress, but it's worth a look for anyone who has played and enjoyed the board version. Tor says that he'll be fleshing it out in coming days.

I do find it a bit comical that, within days, several users posted messages challenging the programmer on everything from the functionality of various parts of the interface to his choice of the programming language. A guy in Norway writes a freeware program in his spare time that is based upon a freely-offered board game designed by a American gamer during his spare time -- yet the "community" still feels entitled to complain. More evidence of two things I already knew: (1) gamers love to complain and (2) we live in a rich world.

January 24, 2010

Patrick and I played another game of Farkle today after school. Patrick won this time 10,700 - 4,150. Andrew and I have downloaded a Farkle-like app for our iPod Touches called 10,000 Lite.

We also each played the Sands of Time scenario for Delve the Dice Game. The "chemical formula" for Delve is 95% Yahtzee + 5% Heroquest. The game is free (print and play), with the rules and scenarios available at Boardgamegeek.

The game (which is played solo) starts with a scenario sheet illustrating a path, starting with the first encounter of an adventure and ending with the final encounter -- against a "boss" creature. Each encounter has some number of monsters (e.g., six orcs) for the player's party of four adventurers to battle. The player rolls six dice, keeps what he wants and re-rolls the rest -- keeping what he wants from the second roll and re-rolling one last time. Each member of the party can utilize the dice in different ways. For example the fighter scores one hit for each '6,' but is unable to hit more than twice each turn. The rougue hits on a '1,' has no limit to the number of hits, but can only cause damage to one opponent each round. The wizard and cleric can cast various spells on the opponents and the party by using various dice combinations (such as straights, three of a kind or a full house). Each die can only be used for one attack and/or spell. After marking off the damage to the creatures, any surviving creatures are able to counterattack. Each creature's counter-attack is slightly different, but it is always described on the scenario sheet. Subsequent rounds of attack and counterattack continue -- with damage to each side marked on the sheet --until the creatures die (in which case the party continues along the path to the next encounter) or the last member of the party dies. Some encounters allow the party to collect relics which provide special abilities for subsequent encounters. The game plays very quickly, taking about 15 minutes to complete an adventure (or die trying). I rate it a '6' at Boardgamegeek. I recommended the game to Steve, and I know that he and his son were enjoying it a few weeks ago as well.

In today's game, my entire party died in the sandstorm after being hit hard by the scorpions. Patrick was also hit hard by the scorpions, but survived the sandstorm. Immediately after the sandstorm, however, he was hit by bandits in the abandoned fortress. He decided to retreat his party and give up.