rich likes games

my solo games odyssey: an update, and back for more.

Hi. 

Remember when I told you that My Lovely Wife left town? And then she came back?

Now she left again. So I am back to drowning my sorrows in solo board games.

The list from the initial post has shifted a bit. Some games have been dropped (Blokus x2, Book of Classic Board Games), and some have been added:

If I’m Going Down… is a zombie game where the player’s little dude will die. For sure. There’s no getting out of it. But you try to stay alive as long as you can. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is a pretty spectacular card game version of the books, and beyond. I used to own it. I donated my copy to a charity auction. This was the perfect time to get it back.

Swing States 2012 is a solo election game. You can play as either side’s nominee. I love election games, and this’ll be my first time playing one designed for one player. I’m excited to get to it.

Yggdrasil is a cooperative game for 1-6, and I’m told it’s great. It’s about mythical gods and stuff. Not my usual cup of tea theme-wise, but I hear very good things. The cardboard version doesn’t include a way to score the game, but the iPad port has scoring rules created by the designers, so I’ll be using those.

Here’s the updated list, along with my points earned so far, per game.

• A Gamut of Games (book) — 156 pts.
• Agricola — 34 pts.
• Ambush! — skipped
• At the Gates of Loyang — 16 pts.
• Blazing Aces! A Fistful of Family Card Games (book) — 13 pts.
• BuyWord — 660 pts.
• Catan Dice Game — 78 pts.
• D-Day Dice
• d6 Shooters
• Decathlon
• Dungeon Run
• Field Commander: Alexander
• Field Commander: Napoleon
• Friday
• The Game of Shakespeare
• If I’m Going Down…
• Ingenious
• The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
• Mage Knight: Board Game
• Pizza Box Football
• Race for the Galaxy (with The Gathering Storm expansion)
• Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age
• Sorry! Sliders
• Space Alert
• Swing States 2012
• Tumblin’ Dice
• Walnut Grove
• The World’s Best Dice Games (book)
• Yggdrasil

So here we are. I am excited to get back into the swing of things. There will be a couple breaks here and there (Emmys, trip to NYC to see My Lovely Wife’s play), but I think I can get through the list before she’s back for good in mid-October.

If I can survive being a single dad. These kids. Man oh man.

my solo games odyssey: BREAK TIME

My Lovely Wife is in town for a bit, so I am not stuck at the kitchen table playing games by myself all night.

More solo games in about a week.

BECAUSE YOU MUST BE DYING TO KEEP READING THESE.

my solo games odyssey: Catan Dice Game

There’s this game, see? It’s called The Settlers of Catan. It’s lots of people’s introduction to the netherworld of the board gaming hobby. And a lot of people LOOOOOOOOVE it.

I have played Settlers. A lot. But I have also played a bunch of other games. I have a feeling that those people who LOOOOOOOOVE Settlers would be even happier playing something else, but they get sort of stuck on Settlers for some reason.

I think it’s pretty meh. It came out in 1995, I think, and it already feels fairly dated. There have been lots of games to come out since then, and many of them have refined what Settlers was trying to do, and made it much more fun.

Like Bohnanza. Anything I like about Settlers, Bohnanza does better. Its dice version is even better than Settlers’.

All of that being said, I am not a game snob. I think you should play whatever the hell you want to play. If you love sitting around with your pals and playing Monopoly or Risk or Settlers, I think it’s just great. I just hope that you’ll consider looking just beyond them, as well.

Anyway. On to my first of five heavily dice-based games in a row…

Catan Dice Game is the super simplified Settlers you’ve always dreamed of!

It’s actually not that bad. It’s just very basic. Much like the board game, you collect resources of different types, and you use those resources to build roads and settlements and cities and whatnot. 

The good news for me is that the dice game gives you crazy points for doing this. There’s a variant floating around boardgamegeek.com that makes it slightly more like the board game — and limits you to ten points. I played the straight-outta-the-box rules. And that allowed me to get way more than ten points.

It’s fine. It’s light, it’s quick. I think I would have loved it so much I’d have shit my pants, when I was twelve.

Catan Dice Game score: 78

Running TWIP: 957

Getting close to that millennium mark!

my solo games odyssey: BuyWord

BuyWord is my second Sid Sackson entry on the list, and it’s a goody.

I always say that board games are basically prettied-up math problems. This one BARELY counts as “prettied-up.” It’s a straight up math game, trying real hard to look like a word game.

The solo version is just about identical to the multiplayer version. You get some tiles on the table and evaluate them. Each letter has a dot value, and you add up the dots visible on the letters in front of you and square the total. That’s how much the letters cost. Then you sell them in combination with others purchased earlier, hopefully for more than you paid for them.

Buy low, sell high.

Do that a bunch of times, then count up your “money.”

Sid is my best friend on this list. He loves giving you lots and lots of points. Bowling Solitaire netted me the most points so far, and BuyWord has blown it out of the water.

You start the game with $200. Sid says in the solo rules that ending with $800 is a fair game, $900 is good, and $1000 is outstanding.

Guess what. I am none of those.

But I don’t care. Compared to the rest of the games so far, I did AMAZINGLY WELL. And with an exchange rate of One BuyWord Dollar = One Point toward my Total Worth, I just got a whole lot more worth-y.

BuyWord score: 660

Running TWIP: 879

That’s more like it!

my solo games odyssey: I BLEW IT

What did you expect? When someone is this bad at all games period, he’s bound to screw up even the simplest attempt at measuring his Total Worth in solo board game points.

The next three games on the list, Blokus, Blokus Trigon, and The Book of Classic Board Games, don’t work for my little adventure. None of them have official solitaire versions which give you a score at the end.

So I am going to remove them all from my list of games. 

To make up for their removal, I am adding at least two games to the list.

The kind folks at Van Ryder Games have been following my progress, and have graciously offered to send along a copy of their brand spankin’ new If I’m Going Down… !

I’m excited to give it a whirl. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the game from people who had the chance to try it at this year’s GenCon.

I told them that if they could get it to me before I got to that spot in my alphabetical list, I’d play it. So here’s hoping.

I’m also keeping an eye out for solo games that fit the criteria later in the alphabet. Not that I need more to do with monsters like Mage Knight coming up, but, you know, I like games. I just ordered a copy of Swing States 2012. I’m a sucker for election games, and it fits the criteria. So that’ll be on the list, too.

That’s that. BuyWord tomorrow.

my solo games odyssey: Blazing Aces!

I almost wrote this entry in the same nightmarish vernacular this book uses, but I thought way, way better of it.

Blazing Aces! A Fistful of Family Card Games is a book by mega-designer Reiner Knizia. According to boardgamegeek.com, he has published more than 500 games and books about games.

That’s, um, a lot. I think he’s what you might call, “prolific.”

Anyway, Blazing Aces! is his book of poker variants. Not really poker variants you would want to play with your friends for money, but poker variants you might play with your kids, or that kids might play with other kids. 

It’s not a real complex collection, is what I’m saying.

That being said, I did once hole myself up in a hotel room for a few days of games with a buddy, and we worked our way through most of the two-player games in the book. It wasn’t too bad. Of course, we also played War of the Ring twice, which kinda helped swing up the average difficulty for the weekend.

Anyway.

There are two options for solitaire play in the book, and both are fairly annoying. I chose the more innocuous of the two, Oregon. It’s a very basic solitaire game in which you try to assemble the best poker hands you can, each of which are ascribed some points.

Doesn’t the crap below the points just make you wanna punch that book? Ugh.

I played five times. Well, four. I had one rage quit in the fourth game (a busted full house in the second row that just WOULD NOT GET THERE). The most I was able to get in a game was 13 points.

Basing my Total Worth on how many points I can get in games may not have been a very good idea, self-esteem-wise. I’m not worth much.

Oregon score: 13

Running TWIP: 219

my solo games odyssey: At the Gates of Loyang

Another Uwe Rosenberg game, only four games in. 

At the Gates of Loyang is part of Rosenberg’s “Harvest Trilogy,” the other two games being Agricola and Le Havre (which I thankfully traded away before having to learn how to play it solo for this little odyssey, which would have made my brain melt).

I have played Loyang several times before as a two-player. I really dig it. It’s a fun little economic game, where you are constantly trying to squeeze every last coin out of the sales you make.

Also, you plant stuff and harvest it. Like in Agricola, sort of.

I’ll bet money that non-gamers think games about farming sound REALLY BORING. There are plenty of gamer-gamers who feel that way, too. 

I like them. At least these two games about farming.

I mean, I like playing them. I’m not good at winning them, so I don’t know yet if I like winning them. I bet I’d like it.

According to the solo rules in Loyang, a score of 17 classifies you as “good.” 18 gets you a “very good” rating. 19 mean you’re a Loyang “master.”

I played two games of it today. First game, I got 14 points. That did not satisfy me. I was a little rusty before the game. Worth a second shot.

Second game: 16.

I was only able to eke out two more points. I’m not even good.

This does not surprise me (or any of my math teachers (or anyone I’ve ever played games with)). It’s still a great game. 

At the Gates of Loyang score: 16

Running TWIP: 206

my solo games odyssey: Ambush!

This was supposed to be a happy post. This was supposed to be where I told you that after three other failed attempts over the last eight years, I FINALLY got over whatever weird grudge my brain has against this game.

This is not a happy post.

Ambush! is a game I am supposed to love, according to all of my other gaming interests, and according to everyone who’s ever played it ever. It’s a scenario-based WWII game, where each move you make triggers a “paragraph check,” which is where you look up a paragraph in this book, and the paragraph tells you what happens. 

Sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

All of that sounds awesome to me, in concept.

BUT FOR SOME REASON: Every time I have gotten this out to play, I have blown it somehow.

It always begins the same way: Two-or-so hours of rules study. Setting up my squad. Carefully following the setup, step by step.

And it always ends the same way: I realize an hour-and-a-half into the game that I have made some gigantic rules error, that all my work is for naught, and that I don’t have the heart to start again. Not to mention that I now know that [this certain thing] happens once I enter [this certain hex], so that part of the game is ruined until I forget it and try the game again in like two years.

Every. Single. Time.

This time, I forgot that even in Action Rounds, you have to do paragraph checks for every hex you move into. So, about an hour into a firefight, I realized that I had glossed over about a thousand paragraph checks, each with a potential event. 

I mean: Shit. That’s kind of a big rule. 

I considered, briefly, starting over. But the fact of the matter is that it got late, and I have to get up with the kids somewhere between 5am and 6am. 

Part of my goal with this thing was to learn more about the games I own. It’s possible that I’ve learned one very important thing: For some reason, my brain cannot, or will not, handle Ambush!. It’s frustrating. I feel like I should hole up in a cabin some weekend when my kids are in college and FORCE IT. 

Or I could give up on it.

So here I am, only three games in, already taking a pass. Maybe I’ll get back to it later in the odyssey (I won’t). For now, I will pack the game back up and drink this egregiously overpoured glass of Jameson.

Hmph.

Ambush! score: TBD*

Running TWIP: 190

* — Like I said in my initial post, I will average out the points per game, and deduct that many points for each skipped game. So I don’t know yet how much this hurt me, points-wise. Oh, I know how much it hurt me time-wise. ugh.

my solo games odyssey: Agricola

I hadn’t played Agricola since November 8, 2008. I know this because I log all of my games played on a website because I HAVE A PROBLEM, OKAY?

Anyway, it had been a while. So I re-read the rules this evening and dove in, not remembering a single thing about strategy or how anything works, but remembering that I loved it when I used to play it.

Basically, it’s a game about farming. A very complex and cool game about farming. It plays 1-5 players, probably most smoothly with 3-5. There are two versions included, the “Family Game,” for new gamers, and the “Experienced Game,” for the rest of us.

One of the things I look for in a game is that it moves along in a semi-intuitive way. Lots of folks may disagree with me, but I think this is a pretty intuitive game. I have X family members on my board, so they need 3X food at every harvest phase.* I can get them food by planting grain, which I then harvest and bake into bread.

Et cetera.

I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to work. What I actually end up with — every time I play it — is a little pile of the hairs I’ve ripped out because there is never enough game time to make all of the moves I need to make.

Which is another thing I look for in games. That tension.

My point is: I couldn’t get much done. I mean, I did some stuff. I upgraded from a wood home to a clay home, added a room, then flipped up to stone. That was fun. And I kept my family fed — both parents AND their stupid kid — for the entire game. But I had grand ambitions that fell flat. Had to cut some corners right at the end that pissed me off. If you know the game at all, here’s how it all looked at the end, so you can evaluate for yourself:

Anyway, for my two-or-so hour investment, I netted a meager 34 points toward my Total Worth. Not much compared to the score from my fifteen minute game of Bowling Solitaire. But I reacquainted myself with a pretty great game. Hoping to get it back to the table with a group very soon.

Agricola score: 34

Running TWIP: 190

* — in the solo game. it’s 2X per family member in the regular game. just to head off the rules lawyers.

my solo games odyssey: A Gamut of Games

It’s all starting off so easily. I love this book.

A Gamut of Games is a collection of games mostly created by Sid Sackson and some of his pals.

If you don’t know who Sid Sackson was, just know that he designed about a billion games, and most of them are super-duper good. He was kind of the shit, game-wise.

It’s really a great book. It’s actually mildly entertaining as a straight read, if you’re a huge dork who likes games as much as I do. 

Of the three solitaire games in A Gamut of Games, I chose Bowling Solitaire.

It’s scored exactly like bowling, which is to say I had to start over twice in order to get the scoring right, and only after Googling to re-teach myself how to keep score in bowling.

PS: I took bowling in college. I am a zero in the retention department.

Anyway, I’ll leave you to track down a copy of the book (currently $9.95 on Amazon) to get the rules. Suffice it to say, this is a fast-playing card-based solitaire game, and it’s a kajillion times more interesting than the regular solitaire game you’ve played so very many times.

Also, I am much better at bowling with playing cards than I am at bowling with a ball. Which is NOT SAYING MUCH.

Bowling Solitaire score: 156

Running TWIP: 156