On Confusion and Delay

Anyone who has had young children in the last 20 years or so will recognize the titular phrase and immediately start expecting something involving trains.

Patience, grashopper.  For the moment I am going to be slightly more literal.

Confusion and delay seem to be the preferred modus operandi lately at work.  What makes it even more so is that the confusion and delay comes from a fear of confusion.  The operations people have such a morbid fear of the unknown that they can't possibly move forward with anything that has not been documented in triplicate, tested at least twice, deployed, rolled-back, and otherwise spoon fed to them from a silver platter.  I have never seen a more risk averse bunch of technical people in my life.

In my professional career I have now experienced both ends of the operational spectrum.  A tech shop full of cowboys is fun for a while, but is ultimately erratic to the point of being irritating.  The other extreme is, of course, the shop full of risk averse semi-trained monkeys.  Comfortable, predictable, but changes direction slower than the Titanic and takes far longer than you think it should to get something useful accomplished.  Try to push it faster, disaster ensues.

At this point I have done what I can to avert the disaster.  Now I just have to sit back and accept the fact that disasters can also be entertaining to one who has job security.

Now to the trains.

My oldest son recently turned 8.  One of the activities for his birthday involved a trek out to a local miniature railway yard.  The Altona Miniature Railway is a hobby club of train enthusiasts who build and maintain garden scale miniature railway engines and track.  I have generally found it fascinating how trains can have an enduring ability to turn people of any age into little kids.  Watching the club members drive and direct their trains around the tracks was no different than watching little boys huddled over a model train set. This is an experience I hope to someday get more of, as I have the beginnings of a model train set and hope to be able to spend some quality time with the boys getting it to be something spectacular.

***Some may have noticed how I gave up and dropped all pretense of gender neutrality about halfway though the previous paragraph.  Part of me wants to take the rest of it out.  So far my last little rant for the day.  Gender stereotypes exist for a reason, folks.  It is because, in general, they are true.  While my wife and I have presented a nearly identical set of toys and media to both my sons and my daughter, the differences in toy preference and behavior is as amazing as it is predictable.  While my daughter still gets excited about cars and trains, the boys are orders of magnitude more so.

The moral of this story?  While you should not force children into a pre-defined mold, you should also not be upset or surprised when the mold fits.

Now I believe I have a few days of gaming to catch up on.

Game report day 17: Yardmaster Express
When the original Yardmaster game went through Kickstarter, it was obvious that it was going to be a short, solid filler game.  Each game takes 20 minutes at the high end.  Then the same designer proposed a shorter, lighter game along the same lines.  The thought amongst the backers and reviewers was the same.  How do you take an already short game and make it shorter, without being uninteresting?  Well, they pulled it off.  Yardmaster Express is a fun little drafting game that plays in about 5 minutes.  As with its longer namesake, the goal is to build a length of cargo cars, with each join having a number or color in common.  In the Express version, you draw a card, add it to your hand, choose one card to add to your train, then pass the remaining cards to the next player.  For a short game with limited decisions, this can get pretty intense and quite a lot of fun.  Every time I get this out, we end up playing multiple rounds.

Game report day 18: Stationmaster
What can I say.  I have a lot of train games.  I blame the aforementioned children.

This particular train game is a Mayfair title from 2004.  In this card game you are not only building a train of various types of cars, but you are populating that train with a secret number of passengers.  The secret aspect of the passengers gives a bit of a bluff game feel to this game.  While all players have the same passengers to assign to trains, how they do it is secret, and and definitely have a huge impact on scoring.  There is also the possibility of tricking (or forcing) your opponent to put passengers on what amounts to a negative value train.  High class passengers apparently don't like sharing a train with cargo cards full of fish.

Game report day 19: Tiny Epic Galaxies and Tiny Epic Kingdoms

It was Tuesday once again and there was the usual morning decision of what I was going to haul to the meetup.  This particular Tuesday I was in no mood to carry a lot, given that the high temp was supposed to be north of 30C.  So I packed up the Tiny Epics.  After the initial experience of playing Tiny Epic Galaxies with my wife, I wanted to see what a full five player experience was like.  I also wanted to see how the Superweapon add-on played.  Both were as excellent as I had hoped.  The players trickled in but eventually we got a full table of five.  After a full explanation to four newbies, we got started.  Predictably enough, the game was much slower with five players simply because there were more cards to read.  If I had one complaint, the planet cards should be bigger.  With five players at a large table, it is rather difficult for players on the fringes to read the critical text.  It was a close game with the top three players separated by just a few points.  I did manage to pull out the win, but just barely.
Following that game, most of the players dispersed, but two returned for a game of Tiny Epic Kingdoms.  The first installment in the Tiny Epic series is a reasonably typical 4x game (expand, explore, exploit, exterminate).  This round it was the Merfolk vs. Centaurs vs. The Order of Gamelyn.  This was a close game too.  The Centaurs quickly learned that war is an expensive proposition and not always a good idea, even if you do win.  The Order (me) learned that they need to do a much better job of actually using all of their available magic abilities.  Then, just maybe, they would not have lost to the silly tower-building Merfolk in a tiebreaker.  Grrr.

Game report day 20: Zombie Dice
One of the wonderful things about Steve Jackson Games in general is that you don't have to think very hard to play.  Zombies don't have brains, they eat brains.  On this particular evening, both my wife and I were tired zombies ourselves, so the game seemed appropriate.  That and it kept the streak alive.  Two rounds were played and I lost both in spectacular fashion.  In particular Santa Claus was good to her and less so to me.  Neither of us chose to step onto the School Bus of shotgun wielding children. (I love that image)

Game report day 21 - Yardmaster Express and Dragon Kings

If any one game has convinced my wife that my now eight year old does not need help on most simple games, this is it.  He and I played two rounds this evening, splitting victories.  The first game he definitely recognized and took advantage of a mistake I made.  Definitely not helping this goon on Yardmaster strategy ever again.

The second game of the night was a new one for me, as in it just arrived in the mail today.  This was a game that I tripped over on Kickstarter.  The project intrigued me for a few reasons.  First, the art looked interesting.  I like dragon art, and this looked reasonably well done.  Second it was a short campaign at just a couple weeks.  Third, it claimed to be a complete deck builder game in a 52 card deck of cards.  While I already have a few deck builders in the collection, a more portable one seemed just a little interesting.  Finally, they were predicting delivery of the finished product to backers in less than a month.  This is what really caught my attention.  As anyone with any Kickstarter experience knows, the wait for the final product often takes months, sometimes years, if it ever arrives at all.  Having a project predict delivery in just a few weeks is unheard of.  So I bought two.  This was the option of combining two decks to allow for 3-4 players.  I like to have the option in games if it allows.

The game arrived as predicted, in less than three weeks.

After just one play, I do have some observations and complaints.  In general, this is an interesting, simple, deck builder.  Think Dominion Ultra-light.  The lack of variability in the cards does seem to limit the replay value, but after one game, I think it has more legs than initially thought.  I can see a tightly run game running very fast, allowing very little time to develop strategy.  This means that you will have to play multiple games to try out different paths to victory.  Not a bad thing.  The cards themselves are of decent quality and the artwork is pretty good.  My primary complaint is that I wish there was more of it.  Most of the cards could have been designed with less border and more dragon art.  The other major complaint is the instruction sheet.  This looks like an afterthought as it likely was run off on a black and white laser printer, then folded eight ways and stuffed into the card box.  Was there really not enough room on the card sheets to print off a couple double sided instruction cards.  Or even faded paper that was fixed for the tuck box?  Anyway, this will be worth playing more, and almost certainly will be a permanent resident of my travel game set.