On the Old and the New and Milestones

Often the coolest innovations are ones that are, on their surface, very simple.  The thing I am referring to is Google Cardboard.

This is something that I delayed getting for quite a while, simply because I did not relish the idea of paying money for a piece of folded cardboard that was basically a cheap Viewmaster.  Then I read an article about a pediatric surgeon who used the technology to prepare for an extremely delicate heart operation.  This got me curious enough to spend the money.

Now that I have one, I can say with confidence that this is FREAKIN AWESOME!!!  The combination of the simplicity of the headset itself, with the capabilities of the required smartphones and the app design come together to make for a surreal experience.  One note of warning for people who are no considering this.  The standard Google Cardboard is not sized for the current generation of ginormous smartphones.  I do recall that there are variants available online that are sized for the iPhone6 series and their (evil) Android counterparts.

A couple of milestones to mention.  At some point shortly after the last post, this journal hit 500 views.  WHEE!  Keep reading people and pass it along.  I hope you enjoy it.

Also this week is the one year anniversary of my initial arrival in Australia.  I have enjoyed every minute of it and it continues to be one wild ride.  Looking forward to the next year with great anticipation.

Now to the game play updates -

Game report day 28 - Sequence
This is one of those simple, classic games that has a depth of thought and strategy that is not immediately obvious.  What is a little different about this game is the kind of passionate following that it seems to generate.  Much as people purchase fancy chess, backgammon, and go sets for display and easy play, game stores have large format Sequence boards and playmats.  I can't say that I understand the fervor that Sequence generates, but to each their own.  One thing I can say is that I would like to see how this game plays with a larger number of people.  I can imagine things could get pretty crazy, and that is usually a good thing.

Game report day 29 - Australian Menagerie
There are times when I worry that my board game obsession, at least the collection end of it, has bled onto my wife.  This was one of those times.  Beginning almost with the instant that I received confirmation of my adventure down under, she has been on the lookout for Aussie themed or produced games.  We now have more Aussie themed games that American themed games.  To be fair, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

One of the more recent acquisitions was this Australia Menagerie game, a card game focused on Australian wildlife and their associated habitats.  This hit two buttons for my wife.  Not only for the Aussie theme, but it has an educational bent as well.  The play is relatively simple.  In each round, cards representing animals are drawn.  As populations of critters are assembled, they are placed into their appropriate habitat on the player play mat.  The round is over when someone can no longer play or draw more cards.  At his time, points are totaled and the next round commences.  In addition to the animals, there are threats the native species (fire, invasive critters, etc) and management policies that can defend against those threats.  From a thematic standpoint, this is something that I quite liked.  In reality, you can almost never remove an environmental threat.  You can only manage it.  Three of us played and fun was had by all.  Afterwards, my wife did express some regret in the purchase.  There are five expansions with more animals.  The completionist tendencies in both of us are going to very nearly force the purchase of all five.

Game report day 30 - Pandemic
This is seen as one of the greatest and most enduring of the cooperative games, and a must-have on every gamer's shelf.  The players are acting as a reaction team, operating out of Atlanta, in an organization that for whatever reason is not named as the CDC.  Four diseases had reached epidemic status and it is the job of the players to use their unique skills and teamwork to treat and cure these diseases before an apocalyptic Pandemic is reached.

This is one of my favorite games for a number of reasons.  First, it was one go my greatest thrifting successes.  I found my first edition copy at Goodwill for a measly five bucks.  Second, it is a classic coop game that has excellent replay value.  Third, the difficulty level strikes a good balance.  With two players, you will the majority of the time.  With four, your odds decrease substantially, but it is not impossible (unlike a particular Reiner Knizia coop that I could mention).  The wife and I played through and won, though not by a lot.  We were just one outbreak away from disaster, making this the closest two player session that I have played ever.  It did not help that we were playing with the Dispatcher and Researcher roles.  This has to be the worst combo I have ever drawn.

Game report day 31 - 6 nimmit!
This was another Goodwill find a number of years ago, and illustrates one of the problems that thrifters face when collecting board games.  Many of the great games of this era are made and designed in other countries, most notably Germany.  As such it is not uncommon to find games that have instructions that require translation.  Thankfully, there is the wonderful community at Boardgamegeek that has most of these on demand.

6 nimmit!, also marketed as Take5, or Take 6, is a press your luck style card game.  Numbered cards are played into a series of rows on the table.  The specific row is determined by comparing the number of the card to the last number in the row.  If a player plays, or is forced to play, the sixth card in the row, they take the previous five cards and the sixth becomes the new start of the row.  Taking cards is a bad thing, as each card has one or more cow heads that become points.  When someone reaches 66 points, the game is over and the low score wins.

The doublethink involved in this game is not something I am particularly good at.  I am reminded of this every time I attempt to play this game online.  Thankfully for me, at least on this evening, I was better at it than my wife.  Either way, the predominant opinion is that the game would be much more fun with a larger group.  At the very least it would be more unpredictable.

Game report day 32 - Khet /w Eye of Horus expansion
I received this quite a long time ago, and it has consistently remained one of my favorites. (Yes, I know I say that I lot, but with a collection like mine, I can't help it.)  What can I say, it is like Egyptian chess, but with LASERS!  The goal is to maneuver your pieces such that when your (or your opponent's) laser is fired it hits your opponents Pharaoh piece.  Many of the pieces are mirrored to assist with this, though most are mirrored on only one side.  This means that they themselves are vulnerable to the laser.  The addition of the Eye of Horus expansion added an additional twist, a beam splitter for each player.  Now you have to worry about not one laser path, but potentially more.   This game has the value of teaching people to think spatially and plan ahead, thinking carefully about the consequences of their next move.  More than once I have seen an opponent make a move just to find that they have just offed their own piece, or worse, their own Pharaoh.

Khet has also been, until recently, the source of one of my greatest gaming regrets (follwed shortly by that same Knizia coop that was alluded to earlier).  There is a third expansion to the original edition of the game called the Tower of Kadesh.  This took what was essentially a two dimensional game into the third dimension.  As the name suggests, a tower is added to the board and pieces and the laser can move up to and down from the elevated platform.  The tower itself is even mobile.  Unfortunately, this expansion has been long out of production and is nearly impossible to find for anything less than a hundred bucks, if you can find one at all.  You can imagine my happiness when I tripped over one on Ebay for roughly fifty bucks.  Now there is just the pain of waiting for shipping.  I had to have it shipped stateside first owing to exorbitant international shipping costs.  Stay tuned for another session as soon as it lands down under.

Game report day 33 - King of Tokyo, Kill Doctor Lucky, Entropy, Yardmaster Express
The weekly game meetup resumed after the Australia Day holiday, and it was back with a celebration of its own.  This was the meetup's two year anniversary.  One of the organizers had the quote of the night when thanking the large group of regulars saying, "We would not be here two years on, if you were all assholes!"  I need to remember that one.

Now for this occasion I had brought with me The Agents and Yardmaster Express.  For whatever reason there was not a lot of interest in the Agents, and we had a table of six to entertain (Agents will only play to 5).  So we got out King of Tokyo first.  Modern classic of a press-your-luck style dice game.  As Kaiju monsters trying to flatten the "Matchstick City" the six players eagerly dove into their task.  I jumped to an early lead, quickly running up to within 5 points of the win.  Unfortunately, I pressed my luck just a little to hard and was the the first monster dispatched.  I did not have long to wait, as one of the other players, in a massive flurry of monster activity, finished up the game with a 20 point win.

With the monsters boxed up, the players were apparently still in a destructive mood as Kill Doctor Lucky was the next box to hit the table.  This is a game that has been around for a long time, originally (and now again) published by Cheapass Games.  On this occasion we were playing the board game edition.  The goal of the game is to maneuver yourself and the good doctor so you are out of sight and then try to send him to meet the choir eternal using any one of a series of weapon cards.  The other players will do what they can to stop this, usually by playing one or more amusing Failure cards up to the value of the weapon you used.  This continues until someone finally manages to off Doctor Lucky.  Very fun game and fun was had by all.  My one complaint is that this is one of those games where players are often put into the position of being kingmaker.  I generally dislike this, as it forces someone to make a decision to give advantage to someone else and get no benefit to themselves.  Games that have this tendency definitely go into the stack of games not to play with people that take games personally.

Quick break and then we dove into Entropy.  This is a game that I picked up at PAX AUS.  The idea is that time and reality have fractured, and it is your task to put your own reality back together.  This is an action selection game. All player actions are selected simultaneously from the same list, revealed, and then resolved.  Players that select the same action clash and do nothing, so there is quite a bit of multiplayer doublethink going on.  Players that clash too often do get a bit of compensation from the game, just so they are not left too far behind.  I found myself in that position a lot, and the compensation of drawing additional cards periodically did not keep me from losing, but it was fun nonetheless.  I can also say that it was much more fun with four than with two.

Final game of the night, Yardmaster Express.  This little drafting game has become one of my standby fillers.  It plays very quickly (10 min. with explanation) and is easy to teach and understand.  Just like its larger cousin, you are adding cargo cars to your train, matching color or number, in an effort to get the highest point total.  We played three rounds with me winning two and another player taking the third.  Much fun had by all.

Game report day 34 - Trivia Night
Ok, I might be cheating a bit here.  Sometimes when you are in the corporate game, you have to make sacrifices.  This particular evening, the Australia services team at work was gathering for drinks, socializing, and a trivia game.  This was your typical ad-hoc trivia game designed for a large group, but in the spirit of the event, fun was had by all.  That and we learned some useless facts, which is always useful.

Game report day 35 - Tiki Topple
If you look at the condition of this game, you might be fooled into thinking that it has been played constantly for the last couple years.  As much as I like this game, that is not true.  The damage was caused my one or more particularly attentive toddlers.  Let this serve as a warning.  If you have small children, invest in secure storage for your hobby, as small children are the universes most powerful sources of entropy.

Anyhoo, this is another action selection game where each player has the same set of action cards to choose from.  The goal is to figure out how to optimize your actions without telegraphing them.  At the beginning of each round, players are given a secret set of three tikis.  The goal is to maneuver the stack so that the tikis indicated on your card are at the top, in the designated order.  The better job you do, the more points you get.  Even with two players, rounds go very quickly and even if one round goes poorly, one can quickly make up the ground the following round.  Very fun, very colorful (hence the attraction of the toddler), very well made (hence its survival) game.

Game report day 36 - Marrying Mr. Darcy /w Emma Expansion
My wife and I were introduced to this game some time ago by friends that backed the first Kickstarter campaign.  Great fun was had, enhanced by the fact that my wife is a certifiable Jane Austen nut.  When the Kickstarter campaign for the expansion was announced, we quickly backed it.  After what seemed to be an unusually long wait, the game arrived yesterday.  As players, you are the heroines of Pride and Prejudice, doing everything that they can to marry to their greatest advantage.  To that end, they enhance their character (necessary for even attracting the suitor's attention) attend parties, and avoid fumbles that may damage their chances.  In the end, a roll of the die determines whether they get a proposal from their preferred suitor, or then end up and an old maid.  This element, for the record is my one complaint about the game.  I never like the idea that an entire game of skilled preparation can be defeated by one or two bad die rolls.  After playing the base game, which my wife won handily, we swapped in the Emma expansion.  This is less of an expansion and more of a re-skin.  The base mechanics of the game are the same, and the goal is largely the same.  What differs are the characters and the associated player abilities.  As with the base game, the designers kept to the theme of the book well.  There were more blunders and matchmaking in the world of Emma.  This time I emerged as the victor, much to my wife's irritation, as I intentionally pursued her intended suitor.
Speaking of my wife's irritation, I could not convince her to play with the included Undead expansion.  Not really sure why.  ;)