What really bothered me about all of this was that I felt like my kids deserved a better summer. I don’t feel obligated to provide some grand excursion every summer, but I do feel like a summer isn’t really a summer without some kind of family trip. This did not happen this summer; however, the summer was saved from total disaster by a small plastic box.

We have never been a video game family, but one day my wife brought home the new Xbox 360 with the Kinect tuner. I argued against it, but she felt it was important for various reasons that the kids have something fun this summer. I think it was a good call on her part. What I thought would divide the kids has brought them together. What I thought would be a huge waste of money ended up being a pretty good value for the amount of entertainment we’ve gotten out of it.

The Kinect is pretty amazing. Just yesterday we downloaded the new Fruit Ninja game for it, and it’s a blast. Watching my kids jump around and laugh while they slice up virtual fruit is a bargain at $9.99. The regular games are fabulous as well. My kids are five years apart, and yet they have a great time playing something like the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean game. I haven’t really played any console game since Final Fantasy VII, and I’m blown away by these new games like Gears of War. It’s crazy when I think back to the Atari games I had when I was my daughter’s age. We also use the Xbox to stream Netflix and ESPN. It’s an entertainment suite.

I still love my boardgames, but I have to admit that my wife made a good purchase.

Ironically, my wife has recently become obsessed with the Capcom Mobile Smurf Village game. It’s ironic because my wife gave me such a hard time when I was playing WoW and made fun of me for playing Farmville on Facebook when it first came out. Well, since I bought her an iPhone, she’s been totally obsessing about these crazy Smurfs. She was up until 1:30 AM waiting for a virtual watermelon to ripen.

I don’t think she would be interested if it wasn’t about Smurfs. My wife loves Smurfs. I think she also likes the Snorks, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not sure why she loves the Smurfs. Maybe she longs for a simple and magical existence in an enchanted forest where everyone you know can be described with a single adjective, or maybe she just likes the idea of being the only woman in a village filled with men who fawn over her and bring her gifts. I don’t think either of those reasons really apply. I think she just likes Smurfs.

You’ve hit upon a very important aspect of this hobby– the learning curve. It’s amazing how the act of learning the rules to games actually makes you more adept at learning the rules to games.

I think this is the root cause of several different phenomena: the constant search for “gateway” games (games that teach new gaming concepts quickly and painlessly), the burn-out on familiar games (Settlers is too basic now that we understand it), and of course, the cult of the new (being addicted to learning/exploring new rules).

Neat post, and something to think about!

I think Greg’s on to something here.

Gateway games

The learning curve for some of the best games of our hobby is pretty steep, so if you want to get your friends and family to start gaming, you’ve got to find a game that will introduce them to some basic game mechanics. We refer to these games as gateway games.

I still keep an eye out for gateway games, especially games that I think my children will enjoy. You’ve got to be careful though, some games that may look like gateway games are not. I recently purchased a copy of Wooly Bully, which at first glance seemed like a good introduction for kids to a tile laying game like Carcassonne. However, when I got it home and actually played it, I discovered that Carcassonne is the best introduction to games like Carcassonne. I should know better than to make exceptions to my play it before you buy it rule.

Burn out

A quick check of my stats on BGG tells me that I haven’t played Ticket to Ride since February of 2009. Why? Because even though I like the game, most of my gaming friends are tired of it. They burned out on it long before I even showed up.

I can’t think of many games that I’m burned out on. I don’t think I play enough to get too burned out on anything. I’ve only been seriously into the hobby for a few years, and I used to have this pattern of trying something new, playing it a few times, and then moving on to the next new thing that caught my eye.

The cult of the new

Up until 2010, there was no play it before you buy it rule for me. I bought everything that looked cool and was new, and new meant new to me, not just newly published. In a matter of a few years, I went from having a collection of say seventy games to having a collection of two hundred games. I wanted to try everything. I wanted to own all the cool new games and all the cool old games. If it won the Spiel des Jahres, then I figured I should own it. New new new. My friend Doug Garrett leads the cult of the new, and I would listen weekly to his Jedi mind tricks and put some new game on my wish list like a child at Christmas, looking through the Sears catalog. Buy buy buy.

I didn’t really feel the need for any game after that. I’m now much more concerned about who I’m playing with than what I’m playing, which I’m sure is only reinforcing my reputation as an elitist jerk. I haven’t stopped buying new games. I’m just much more selective about what I purchase, and I do try and play it before I buy it. I’m also trying to trade off some of my game collection. I still listen to Doug’s podcast, and I appreciate that he busts his butt to keep us informed every week of all the new stuff that’s available, I just don’t feel the need to own all of it. I think that this learning curve that Greg mentioned has managed to both speed my introduction into the hobby and then slow my interest in and acquisition of new games.

I don’t want to sound like I think the cult of the new is something wrong. Hell, I depend on my friends who are members of the cult of the new. If they didn’t enjoy that aspect of the hobby, then I wouldn’t get the opportunity to try new games. There’s going to be some particular aspect of the hobby that appeals to someone on a personal level, whether it’s learning new rules, collecting new games or a particular series of games, playing one game until they’ve reached mastery of it, or just finding the right games that bring their friends together in a social setting.

Something to think about indeed. Thanks Gregg!

The application uses all of the great graphics from the physical production and the game looks great. Game play is the same as well, and the app features both single player and multi-player mode, where opponents can just pass the device back and forth as they take their turns. After one game, I disabled the annoying hints and tips that kept popping up, but it didn’t eliminate as much of the interrupting frames as I would have liked. I also turned off the sound effects after the first game, but found that I actually missed them later, so I turned them back on.

The application captures all of the important elements from the physical version of the game, and for fans of the game, like myself, who don’t get to play it as often as we would like, and don’t feel like going online and playing it at BrettspielWelt, the application is well worth the five buck download.

The only real problem with the application is that I cannot see how anyone who is not very familiar with the game could hope to make any sense out of this thing. One of my favorite things about the board game is that huge board that has all of the advisers, where you place your dice. In the application, the advisers only appear as you assign values to them, and this makes it much more difficult to think about where and how you want to place your dice. It didn’t make a big difference to me, but I am very familiar with the game. I imagine that the game is very frustrating for new players.

I still prefer to sit down and play the real version, but I think they did a nice job with this. I’m just happy to have way to enjoy one of my favorite games.

I actually played some RPGs! I’ve been talking about this for a long time, but I finally got to play both Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition and Savage Worlds. I had been very hesitant to do so last year at Kublacon, because I just didn’t want to sit down with total strangers, who could end up being total dweebs, and be stuck there for six hours.

I got up early Saturday morning and got in on the first Kublacon dungeon crawl of the day. The dungeon crawl had a four hour time limit, so I figured I was pretty safe. Actually, I got up early every day. Gamers are notorious for sleeping in, and it was wonderful to get up and have breakfast alone in the beautiful atrium at the Hyatt in Burlingame. There were a few of us early morning folk, and we would silently nod in understanding of our elite club. I especially appreciated the recommendation for the Eggs Benedict made by my buddy I referred to as “Old Breakfast Guy.”

Anyway, after breakfast, I played Dungeons and Dragons for four hours. I lucked out, and of the five other people involved, there was only one dweeb. Everyone else, including the Dungeon Master was great, and I had a wonderful time. We played on this gorgeous 3D terrain set-up. All of the pieces were from Dwarven Forge. It was very impressive and took up two large tables. I’m sure it would be well over $1000 to purchase this kind of set up. It was crazy cool. If anyone wants to order some of this stuff for me as a gift, you have my permission. I hope to run my own game soon, real soon, even without the cool 3D terrain.

I also signed up for a Savage Worlds session. I lucked out and inadvertently got in on a game run by Scott Alan Woodard, who ended up being a friend of a friend, although I didn’t know that until afterward. He was a fantastic storyteller and this was an even better RPG experience than the D&D dungeon crawl. In terms of actual roleplaying, the Savage Worlds system beats 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons hands down. The system is simple and flows easily from encounter to encounter without getting bogged down with minutiae, and the basic rule set is available for under $10 as opposed to the $70 that you have to drop for the Dungeons and Dragon rules.

I spent time with some great people! Not only did I travel with some good friends from here in the Central Valley, I also got to play some games with friends from the Bay Area and beyond. I met a lot of new folks as well. Gamers, for the most part, are a very social group, which makes sense, right? On the last day of the con, I played The Adventurers with two good friends and some dude that walked up and thought we were doing a demo, and talked to the owner of the Game Kastle who was watching us play. (He’s a nice guy. Go buy stuff at his store.) That’s how it was the entire weekend. I met nice people. I played great games. The Kublacon staff was very helpful as well. They really did a nice job this year.

I found some great deals! I did well at the Friday night and Monday morning flea markets. You have never seen such a mass of geekmanity fighting for bargains. There were no deals to be found in the dealer’s room, ironically, but that’s not a big surprise. I did pick up a couple of games at the auction. That was amazingly fun. I’m not sure why, but I sat there for a couple of hours and just enjoyed bidding and watching. I only won two games, but I got them for cheap! I’ll tell you what was not cheap: food. I was falling asleep at a table Sunday evening while we were playing Forbidden Island and went off in search of coffee or an energy drink. I love this hotel, but geez, give me a break on the prices for food and drink. It’s worse than an amusement park.

My game won the design contest! Yes, after all that moaning about my prototype, my game was chosen as a co-winner of this year’s Kublacon Game Design Contest. I was very surprised, because all of the games looked really good. The game that was also chosen was really impressive. I don’t know what’s going to happen with my game now, but winning the contest was a wonderful way to end the weekend. Will it be picked up for publication? Who knows? I had at least one publisher that showed some interest. Now I need to make some more copies and start knocking on doors, I guess. Special thanks need to go out to Julie Haehn, the designer of Living Labyrinth, for all of her support.

I’m just rambling now, so that’s it. Happy gaming!

The last couple of months have been filled with household/automotive/work disasters. I’m talking big disasters, costing a lot of money. Just this week, the air conditioner broke, and we just started hitting triple digits here in Fresno. Well, okay, so I schedule that to get fixed and then the house fan breaks, which was making it bearable at night. “Seriously?” I asked nobody in particular. I’m sure it will be fixed soon and all will be well, but right now it’s really uncomfortable here.

We’ve been playing a lot of games though. The big hit right now is Forbidden Island. This is a really great game, and we’ve played it multiple times in the last week. For the price, you get a fabulous game with lots of replayability. Look for it at your local game shop, or find it online. Hey, if you order through the link shown, I might even get a few pennies to help pay for my air conditioner.