On Testing, Risk, and Blame

I have not posted anything in a while, and in true human fashion I am going to make an effort to formulate some plausible excuses.  The most obvious, and probably most accurate, is that I have been lazy.  Secondarily I have been extremely busy at work of late, although even that has qualifiers.  In terms of actual things to do, work has been rather dull.  Unfortunately when certain people have less to work on, they start to spend more time looking around and analyzing their situation.  This, in a large project on a tight timetable, can be disastrous.  Managing this situation can be time consuming and mentally draining.

When people who previously were not looking start looking they find things that are suddenly critical problems that should have been addressed months ago but now are top priority with no time left to actually come up with a productive solution.  The lesson to be learned from this?  Manage you manager's time carefully.  If you let your guard down for even a moment....

Next lesson, either make very good friends with the security administrator, or when that is not possible, have an airtight alibi and several places to hide the body ready.

Final lesson for today, make sure that the people running test regimes for your project actually know what they are doing.  For example, make sure they actually know the difference between functional testing and recursion testing.  I actually had to explain to test managers today that when testing a file level backup/restore solution, testing restoration of each individual file on the hundred-or-so servers was completely unnecessary, as was testing application functionality after each file restore.

Of course all of this irritation is the product of an organization that unbelievably risk-averse and is terrified at the prospect of the finger of blame being pointed in their direction.  Ugh.  Grow up people...

Fortunately I have my home, my wife, my children, and my games to help me maintain a level of no-destructive insanity.

Game report day 53 -Trans America
I really need to get this one out more often.  Train games in general are a lot of fun.  I have never been able to determine why the genre has such a near universal appeal, and in practice is really does not matter.  This particular game has been in the gaming news of late as there is supposedly a very, very long awaited reprint in the works.  That is good because it is a fantastic little lightweight train game.  Even with just my wife and I, it is a lot of fun, although I do prefer it with more people.  Things get much crazier and hard to predict as the board geography gets more crowded.  In each round of the game, each player as five cities that they need to connect with track.  As soon as your rail network connects with another, you can build off of the now combined network.  As such deciding when you make that connection can be a very important and strategic choice.  I lost the first round, but ended up winning the game by a reasonable margin.  Fun had by all.

Game report day 54 - Settlers of Catan, Seafarers of Catan, Traders and Barbarians of Catan, Helpers of Catan, Frenemies of Catan
The Catan franchise has a special place in many gamer's hearts.  It is one of those modern classics of the modern era and for many, was the gateway game that got them started into the hobby.  While my entrance into the role of hardcore board gamer did not necessarily follow the normal path, I can say that the island of Catan did hold an important role.

The age and popularity of the game does create a few problems.  One of these is that game publishers sometimes do silly things with popular games.  Sometimes they publish new editions that sport minor changes. Sometimes they produce a library of expansions that purport to make the base game new and more exciting.  The Catan franchise has done both.  While I don't have all of the expansions, I do have quite a few.  When the Tuesday Meetup organizers announced a Catan night, I had a "wonderful" idea.  I knew that most of expansion content that I had for Catan had never made it to the table (mostly because the game does not play well at all with two).  Since I knew there would be plenty of offerings of plain vanilla Catan at the Meetup, I decided to go in a different direction.  I wanted to make the most complicated Catan setup that I could that did not suck.

Here is what I came up with.  Starting with the base game, adding in Seafarers (to get more geography and boats), then adding in the Great River from Traders and Barbarians (obstacles and more scoring options), Fishermen from Settlers and Barbarians (more resources and makes settlements on the coast not suck), Helpers of Catan (mini expansion offering limited use special abilities), and Frenemies (offering special benefits to players that are not assholes).  For the most part, the layout was random.  I did have to make a few adjustments here and there, but not much.  The other change was the use of the Event Deck rather than dice. Anyone who has played this game knows how vindictive those red and yellow D6s can be.  Using the Event cards gives a little more assurance that probability will hold sway.

The final verdict from the players?  Totally Awesome!  All had played the base game before and all found the extra content very interesting.  While it did take significantly longer to finish, everyone had an excellent time and said that they would love to play the combo again.

Game report day 55 - Cribbage
After all of the complication the night before, it was refreshing to return to an older classic.  I know people for whom the evening game of cribbage is almost a ritual.  I generally don't play cribbage with these people as I tend to lose often and badly.  As with many of the ancient classics, easy to learn, takes a long time to master.

Game report day 56 - Fortress
Going from a very old card game to a brand new one.  I came across a Kickstarted recently that was pitching the development of 4-5 new card and dice game for a measly eight bucks.  Since I am generally all about new games for cheap, I was in.  A few weeks later, the pdf rules for the new games were delivered.  The first my wife and I tried was Fortress.  This one has a simple mechanic, but the strategy involved is deep.  Players first draw a hand of cards slowly contracting their Fortress.  Ideally, you have face cards in the middle protected by lower value cards on either side.  Then you attack the other player's hand with your defensive cards trying to capture some face cards.  Using cards for attack makes their defense value known, so choosing what to use is not something done lightly.  This is one that will take some more plays to really develop strategy.

Game report day 57 - Dice Wars
The next night we tried the dice game.  The rules sheet included a small playing field.  The object of Dice Wars is to knock down your opponent's live points, indicated using a D20.  This is done using D6 pawns, which are rolled.  The value rolled indicates both its power and how far it can move.  The tricky part is that the pawn MUST move its full value.  The only thing you can control is its starting point.  This forces the player to look ahead and see where his opponent's pawns are likely to be.  If you consistently land in gaps (as I did) you can knock down their life points in fairly short order.  Like the previous entry, this will take some more plays to be sure, but I think this is a keeper.

Game report day 58 - Wombat Rescue
The fifth player bits that I ordered (that I should have ordered during the Kickstarter campaign but missed - grr) arrived recently and we had convenient time where my wife and eldest son could sit down and maneuver pooping wombats.  The game went much much smoother this time, as one would expect with players that all understood and remembered the rules.  We also added in the boulder obstacles to make the field a little more interesting.  Even with the extra obstacles, everyone seemed to be able to get around the board to where they needed to go with little effort.  The winning strategy (mine, of course) seemed to be doing your best to have an unobstructed return path in the middle of the board.  The extra player abilities did not factor as highly in as I would have expected.  I think there was a memory from the first game thinking the single use powers were exhausted too early.  Anyhow, fun still had by all.

Game report day 59 - Iota
Iota is a miniature card version of an abstract that I really enjoy, Qwirkle.  Iota makes things a little more complex by giving each tile three traits (instead of two) and making each tile unique.  For the sake of sanity there are 3 wild cards as well.  Aside from that, the game plays exactly the same.  You create lines of cards, where each element in the line mush all match or all differ.  Points are scored for each line added to, and double points are scored for making sets of four.  Towards the end of the game I drew two if three wild cards and was able to use them to great effect.  I still lost, but without the lucky draws, I would have lost in spectacular fashion.

Game report day 60 - In A Pickle
Another Gamewright title I need to get out more often.  I had not played it in a while because for some reason I thought it needed at least three players, and I was sure my elder son was not quite ready.  I can safely say now that I was incorrect on both points.  The point of the game is build a chain of items that either fit inside (smaller that) or surround/contain (larger than) the neighboring item.  For example Lake->Planet->Galaxy->Universe.  When a chain of four is formed, each player can try and top the largest card with something larger yet with the last successful player claiming the pile.  First to claim 4-5 piles wins.  What is fun about this game is the bickering that can happen.  The rules clearly state that each card need only relate to its neighbor and that the idea of containment need not be physical.  It can be metaphorical.  For example, the universe can contained my a dictionary.  It is a word after all.  Lots of fun for such a simple mechanic, but then again that is usually what makes good social/party games.

Game report day 61 - Evolution: Climate with Flight Expansion
More play testing at the Tuesday Meetup. I was able to get two rounds in with two completely different groups.  This time I also made the decision to add the Flight expansion into the mix.  During the alpha round of testing, there was a great deal of discussion/complaining about the omission of Flight.  The designer's reasoning was to start simple and get the Climate pieces fleshed out a bit on their own before needing to test in combination with the complexity offered by Flight.  I can't say I agree with him, but his game, his approach.

The first game went pretty smooth.  Some of players were a little slow to pick up that flow of the rounds, but that is to be expected.  The climate hovered on the warm side, diving cold on the last round.  Had the game run one round longer there would have been a game altering mass extinction as a result.  AS it was some people had the cards to capitalize off the abundance of food better than others.  The one that had the best combos was the clear winner.

The second game was drastically different.  First of all, the climate was a much bigger and deadlier factor.  While the general discussion around the table indicated that there was agreement to push the climate cooler, a couple players secretly actively worked against that to their great benefit.  The climate track was pushed all the way to its hottest limit, killing off nearly the whole table save the ones that saw it coming and were able to prepare.  It was a brutal, lower scoring game, but also a lot of fun.  Also I managed to win a six player game, albeit by a single point.

Game report day 62 - Gin Rummy
As seems to be typical for Wednesday nights, neither my wife not I were in the mood for anything complex.  I had a deck of cards on the side table and suggested Gin Rummy.  After hearing my wife say that she did not know how to play, I settled on my choice and proceeded with filling this essential gap in my wife's grey matter. 

As with most classic card games, there are more variations than most people care to keep track of.  This is why I recommend that every serious gamer with any interest in the classics (which by the way should be all serious gamers) needs to have a copy of the Book of Hoyle.  This way you will be sure to have access to all of the "official" variations.  The one that I chose was the most basic that I could remember (both my Hoyle books are in storage).  Gin is the game of drawing cards to create a ten card hand of sets and runs.  The player that does so first lays down his hand and scores points depending on his opponent's failure to do the same.  It is the most basic of set collection games, and one that is good to come back to on occasion.  We played a few hands, not really keeping score, but having fun anyway.

Game report day 63 - Gobblet!
Let last few times I played this was with my son.  As I could not remember ever actually playing the game with my wife, I pulled it off the shelf for a quick game after an evening of playing Game Report Catch-up.  It was a close battle, with both of us nearly taking the win a few times.  I eventually worked her into a corner and pulled out the win.  For a game that is basically Tic-Tac-Toe on steroids, this is a lot of fun.