Gaming in Jamaica

Jamaica was beautiful, as usual. I spent most of my time enjoying the scenery and working on a paper for an economics conference. But I did get a little gaming in.

The first game is a self-published effort called All Time Championship Soccer. It's a download-for-free and print-it-yourself package. The game comes with a roster for 32 nations representing the nation's best World Cup showing. I played three games and shelved it, as the goal scoring seemed excessive. So, my search for a good soccer game continues. I still need to try The World Cup Game, and I now see that APBA has a soccer game available.

Gillian and I split two games of EcoFluxx. I still like the game, but I think Gillian still doesn't quite see the point (which is a common reaction to the Fluxx games).

The best gaming of the week was three games of Early American Chrononauts. I had a feeling that Gillian's dad, Ollie, would enjoy it, since he likes history and science fiction and has a good sense of humor. Gillian beat me in the first game while Ollie watched. In the second game, I managed to draw consecutive "Get there first" cards, and I stole two artifacts from Ollie to win the game. Ollie won the third game by snagging his three required artifacts. It was the first time I had played the game with three players, and it reminded me how much fun the game is.

Finally, I played dozens of games of cribbage on my iPhone in the airport. I think the AI is fairly weak, since I won about 80% of the games.

2010 was a Looney Year

I hope to make a full "Year in Review" posting later this weekend, but I wanted to post my 2010 stats for games played. BoardGameGeek makes this pretty easy, since you can log all of your plays and then view a summary. If you're curious, you can see the games I played in 2010 by clicking here.

The two incarnations of Looney Labs' Fluxx that I own -- EcoFluxx and Monty Python Fluxx got the most plays this year (25 and 17 respectively). The World Cup 2010 Card Game was third with 14. Our most popular Friday Night game, Long Shot, was next with 12 plays. Two other Looney Labs games, Chrononauts and Early American Chrononauts finished fifth and seventh.

Granted, the Looney Labs games are short, which meant that the boys and I could play five games of EcoFluxx in the time it would take the gang to play three turns of Here I Stand. But, the games deserve their place at the top -- we really played them a lot (especially in the spring and summer). And, since they all run between $12 and $20, we definitely got my money's worth.

Twilight Struggle

The boys and I played a number of games this weekend, including The World Cup Card Game 2010 and EcoFluxx. In addition, Andrew and I played Twilight Struggle this afternoon at Wargameroom.

Twilight Struggle -- which simulates the Cold War -- is one of the more innovative game designs of the last few years. (It was published in 2005.) It starts with the card-driven mechanic that Mark Herman pioneered with We The People in 1994, but adds area-control-style mechanics popular in many Euro games.

Wargameroom is a web site with online versions of several card-driven games, including Twilight Struggle. The programs enforce all rules, which makes play move much faster than on a board, or in other online versions where players must carefully verify that their moves (and their opponents' moves) are legal. The programs are free to use (although users are encouraged to make a donation to the developer to offset his costs).

I ended up winning the game today, when Andrew accidently kept a scoring card at the end of a turn (which results in an automatic loss). It was an unfortunate way to lose, but there was no way to redo the turn, and we didn't have time to restart the game. We'll definitely try it again soon. In fact, since the game is played online, we hope to play a game some evening this week (while Andrew is at his mom's house).

Lots of Gaming

No ... this stack of games isn't mine, but it would describe my gaming the last few days.

First up, The World Cup Card Game: The boys are back in town (but not the ones that "been hangin' down at Dino's"), so we've been playing more World Cup action. On Wednesday afternoon my Ghana beat Patrick's Paraguay in the final. Friday afternoon I made an illegal card play to push Patrick's Cameroon over Andrew's Brazil. (In best FIFA tradition, I didn't notice the foul at the time, and we won't be reviewing it.) Finally, Friday night, we taught Teresa to play, and her USA defeated my Mexico in the finals. I'm glad that we're still enjoying the game even though the 2010 World Cup is over. We still want to show the game to Dennis, but I'm afraid that it may go onto the shelf for good in another week. I am looking at the World Cup board game from the same publisher, as it would allow us to play any world cup from 1930 to 2006. The only sticking point is the time requirement -- it appears to be a two- or three-hour game.

While the boys were travelling last week, they remembered how much fun we had playing Naval Battles (published by Phalanx Games) during our trip to Washington, DC last summer. So, Patrick and I played two games on Friday. In the first, my Japanese fleet staged a major comeback to defeat his US fleet. In the second, his German fleet wiped out my British fleet without working up much of a sweat. It's a really fun, fast-paced game, and I'm glad that we pulled it out.

Finally, since my tennis elbow is still acting up, we couldn't play Wii last night. So we played five quick games of EcoFluxx before heading to bed. As is always the case with Looney Labs games, they're best played late at night, since the fun is in the playing, not the strategizing. Patrick and I each won two, with Andrew winning one. We laughed a lot and didn't want to quit. But it was 11 PM, and we all needed to get to bed. In total, we played nine games yesterday.

Mid-Year Report

The year is half over, so I thought I'd look back on my most-played games at this point of 2010.

As I looked at the totals, I couldn't miss an obvious conclusion. The year 2010 is the year that I found Looney Labs games. While the games are not universally loved by gamers (largely because of their chaotic nature), they are fun and quick-playing.

In some ways their quick play makes for an unfair comparison. I'll obviously get more plays out of a Looney Labs game that take 15 minutes to play than a GMT or Fantasy Flight game that takes seven hours. Because of this I have to give a special recognition to GMT's Here I Stand, which I've only played once this year (plus once in December 2009). At this point it would win the 2010 best "new-to-me" game.

With that caveat, here's the list (through June 30th).

1. EcoFluxx (which I've only owned for about a month, but I've played 11 times)
2. Chrononauts (another Looney Labs game, which I've played 9 times)
2. Farkel (a traditional dice game that I've also played 9 times)
4. Early American Chrononauts (Looney Labs' retheming of Chronauts, which I've played 8 times)
4. Hive (which I've also played 8 times, although about half of these were on the iPhone app)
6. Killer Bunnies REMIX (which was the Friday night game of choice for much of the winter and was played 6 times)
6. Long Shot (which is moving up fast, with 6 plays, having been the Friday night choice for the last couple of months)
8. Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age (which I don't even own a physical copy of, but I've played 4 time as an iPhone app)
9. Descent: Journeys in the Dark (a fun dungeon crawl that I've played 3 times, and I think will be played a lot more this year)
9. Scrabble Slam (which I played 3 times with Gillian's family in Jamaica)
9. World Cup Card Game 2010 (which is lots of fun, but probably will be stuck with 3 plays at the end of the year, since the World Cup is almost over)