On Caving and the Excitement that it Can Bring

This is a post that is a long time coming.  There have been many new gaming developments in the household and I really should have given each one its own post.

Thankfully gaming has produced the most interesting things to post about.  The Australian Federal election was completed with no substantive changes in government, which means that the general level of tension in the workplace is greatly reduced.  It also means that the "caretaker period" is over so now everyone can get back to business as usual.  Ahh, the joys of working for what is essentially a government agency.

Now on the subject of caving.  This is intended in both a figurative and a virtual-literal sense.  There is one video game obsession that I have successfully kept out of the far family house and (for the most part) out of the family conversation.  My children were, of course, aware of it through the influence of various family and friends but since we had consistently refused to get the game ourselves, the kids knew better than to press the point.

Then my wife set my elder son a goal at school.  The exact nature of the goal is unimportant.  What matters is the stated reward.  She said that if the goal were to be achieved, that she would talk to me about installing Minecraft.  Initially the thought was to put the mobile version on the iPad.  This is where I stepped in.  I said that if I were going to open that door, then we were going to install the full PC version and do it right.

Of course once I made that statement there was no going back.  The walls holding back the Minecraft tide had caved in and the rest was inevitable.

On the plus side, it has stalled the otherwise constant talk amongst my children about Power Rangers.

Predictably enough the person who has probably spent the most time in Minecraft in the last couple months is me.  I have justified the effort as my parental duty to preview everything my children are going to be looking at.  Secondarily I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about and that I could not only Minecraft with the best, but also that I could do it the hard way.  Unlike my kids, I went straight to Survival Mode and have built my little world exclusively there.  I have a multi-room castle, a "Mage Tower" with ten levels above ground and ten levels below ground with the bottom level holding a portal to the Nether (the Minecraft version of Hell for the uninitiated).  I have spent (what seemed like) endless hours wandering around in virtual caves looking to get all of those rare precious resources that my kids just fling about since they don't want to get out of creative mode and actually work for anything.

See?  You can be a bitter curmudgeon in a virtual world too.

Now for board games.  There have been a few new arrivals recently from Kickstarter projects.

Castle Panic: The Dark Titan - This expansion to the Castle Panic game was a gift from my wife.  It with the base game made it to the table in relatively short order, with myself, my wife, and elder son playing.  The intent behind this expansion was to add some more contact and some ore challenge to the regular game.  Well, it did that.  The Dark Titan kicked our collective asses in grand fashion.  When we looked back at the details of how the game went, there might have been an outside chance at the end of pulling out a win, but we spent so much time teetering on the brink if disaster that any number of bad rolls could have done us in.  In reality, we never had a chance.  Still, fun had by all.

Ultra Coins - This was a project that I backed largely because I thought the artwork looked pretty and the game concept looked simple and portable.  I have always liked the idea that you can be sitting at a table in a restaurant or bar, pull a game out of your pocket, and use it to engage socially with friends or complete strangers at a moments notice.  Unfortunately this game is not going to fit that bill.  The artwork is very nice, but much darker than I was expecting, such that in order to appreciate it the ambient environment will need to be brightly lit.  Secondarily, the coins are heavy.  There is a lot of metal so that alone would discourage anyone from casually caring the game in a pocket.  The game itself does look interesting, so I will need to get it on the table a few times at home before I pass final judgement.

Scythe - Anyone who has not been hiding under the proverbial rocks in the gaming world knows about this game.  As one reviewer put it, there is no other single title that has received more hype in the last year than did this game.  After several plays, I can confidently say that it deserves every last bit of it and more.  Scythe is a resource management, action selection, area control, mechanized combat, economic engine game with a board so massive that it required a table extension.  The players all control factions that are trying to enter influence and gain power in a post-war no man's land in an alternate history 1920's-ish post WWI setting.  The background is all depicted by the fantastic artwork of Jakub Rozalski.  (click here to see more of his art) Throughout the game you are exploring the board with your main character engaging in interesting encounters and doing your best to manage your popularity with the local populace.  This is critical as your final popularity score determines how many coins (points) the fruits of your labor are worth.  Two player games can be nice relaxed affairs, where you can make the game all about developing an economic engine and avoiding direct confrontation altogether.  Five player games can do the same, but and also show brief periods of an all out brawl.  This is not a war game.  Combat is a tool to an end, and an expensive one at that. Thank you, Jamey Stegmaier and the rest of the team at Stonemaier Games for the delivery of another fantastic title.

Simurgh and Simurgh: Call of the Dragonlord - I waffled on this game quite a bit during the Kickstarter campaign.  The artwork was very pretty featuring lots of dragons and it was presented as a worker placement game, one of my favorite game mechanics.  But almost for that reason alone I was close to not backing the project.  Many of my favorite games feature that mechanic and I was asking myself if it would be different enough to justify the cost and the shelf space.  Also, I was not really sold on the look of the components.  I have to say that in that sense I have been wholly spoiled by the consistent quality of production of Stonemaier Games (reference gushing in previous paragraph).  What ultimately tipped the balance was my wife.  She thought it looked pretty and interesting and gave the go-ahead to back the project.  With the marital permission granted, the money was spent.
Now that the game has arrived and the initial play completed, I cannot say that I am disappointed.  I am not raving either, but when you show up a week or two after one of the most anticipated games of the year, that is a hard act to follow.  As I said, this is a worker placement game where your ultimate goal is power, indicated by power points.  You gain power points though various methods, but mostly though action spaces on the board.  Your workers in this game consist of spearmint and dragon riders.  There are some spaces that can only be occupied by the dragon riders, so care must be taken to manage their efficient placement.  In addition you have one or more dragons at your disposal that have their own special and unique abilities to assist you during the game.  What makes this worker placement game unique is that most of the most useful and productive worker action spaces are transient. These action space tiles are placed by the players from a selection in their hand.  The spaces presented are now available for all to use.  However, if that tile is ever unoccupied, or holds too many workers, the tile and its actions are retired, so the players need to take great care if they want to keep access to a particularly useful action space.   This transient nature of resource production capability is both extremely interesting and rather annoying.  It makes planning long term strategies nearly impossible.  Then again, being flexible in your play strategy is often a winning trait in these type of games.
The Call of the Dragonlord expansion is not just one expansion, but a collection of modular content expansions which can be added or removed in virtually any combination.  Some of the content offers just more cards and tiles with no fundamental new rules or mechanics.  Others change the game in fundamental ways.  I really like this approach, being similar to what was done with the Tuscany expansion to Viticulture (one of the aforementioned favorite worker placement games).

Other Games I have been playing lately:  The Agents (with various expansion material), Compounded (also with expansion), Exploding Kittens, Empires of Zidal, Carcassonne, Guillotine, Museé, Arctic Scavengers, Zombie Dice.

The final cave that I have to report has to do with storage.  If you spend any time at all on the board game groups in Facebook and Google+ you have seen and endless parade of "shelfies" where people post pictures of their game collections.  Many of these collections are displayed on what has become the gold standard in board game storage, the Ikea Kallax shelf.  These come in various sizes and configurations, but they all have the distinct feature of shelves that are roughly 33cm square.  This just happens to be the perfect dimensions to store most modern hobby board games.  Fantasy Flight Games in particular have a square box that they use for most of their games and that fits particularly well on the Kallax.
Despite the size of my collection, both my wife and I resisted getting one of these for a long time.  There are several reasons for this.  First, nether of us really care for Ikea furniture.  Second, for most of the life of the collection, we could not really afford it, either in money or in space.  Finally, I am a pack rat.  I can't remember the last time that I actually paid retail prices for shelving other than garage utility shelving, and even then I tended to go cheap.
Well, having been in Australia living in a relatively small apartment for over a year now, my wife wanted some of her closet space back and she suggested getting some shelves for the games.  Collectively we decided that as long as we were going to spend money on something like this, we might as well go big.  So we did.

One 5x5 Kallax later, and we both came to the realization that this was not likely to be our last, given the proportion of the game collection that remains in storage stateside. Fortunately, Ikea has not shown a tendency to retire their standard models for long periods of time.