2012 Five and Dimes

Last year's theme was a refining my collection of games that play during a lunch break.

Card games featured prominently, there aren't enough board games that play in 45-60 minutes.

Dimes

• Dominion 36
• King of Tokyo 19
• Hunt or Gather 13
• Railways of the World: The Card Game 11

Fives

• Eminent Domain 9
• No Thanks! 8
• Chronicle 7
• Cribbage 7
• Flash Duel: Second Edition 7
• Parade 7
• The Resistance 7
• Alhambra 6
• Rumis (Blokus 3D) 6
• Serengeti (Don) 5
• Lords of Waterdeep 5
• Tsuro 5

Play totals

291 plays of 84 different games.

Unicorns and Shadows

Here are my notes for a new game that came to me, and the process I went through building out the initial concept. This was surprisingly similar to the way Hunt or Gather came into being.

First there's a theme, in this case a request from my girlfriend for a unicorn game to go with her unicorn t-shirt. Then I come up with a basic component or concept that will make it different from other games. Next I work on scoring mechanisms so that the game is mathematically sound. Then I throw some tentative play mechanisms at it, like when you draw cards, trading, drafts, stuff like that, these will be adjusted significantly during playtesting, I'm just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Finally, I work out the details of the components in my head.

This all happens in two or three bursts of note taking. The first may happen during civilized hours, maybe triggered by a conversation. But the real meat of the work usually happens in the dead hours of the night. I'll wake up between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning and type up notes in my iPhone. Hopefully I get back to sleep, to wake up again at a more reasonable hour and polish things up. It would be nice if one day I could invent a game without the aid of jet lag or fever. We'll see.

Theme: Unicorns & Demons (should change to Shadows for religious types)

Double sided cards
Black/white/grey on one side, targets, # of dice, modifiers.
Rainbow colors on other, building sets, collections

Deck is stacked with shadow side up, draw that or from 3 color side cards.

Once a card goes into your hand you can't turn it around or look at other side. May show to other people. If need to set down cards place Player Aid facing you before setting down cards as a stack.

Score in 3 ways. Lay out set of different colors, lay out collection of same color, play white dice cards to roll 1, 2, or 3 dice per card, use grey modifier cards to match black number cards, which are scored.

Colored cards need symbols as well as colors.

Turn sequence:

1. Draw 2 cards
2. Pass 1 card (everyone)
3. Trade 1 card (with anyone)
4. Play cards - color sets/groups - white dice, grey modifiers, black goals
5. Discard down to 8 card hand limit

Scoring
Sets: cards of different colors
3 = 3 points
4 = 5 points
5 = 7 points
6 = 10 points

Groups: cards of same color
1 point per card, can add to existing groups

Black goal cards
Points scored by rolling target number.
3, 4
6, 7, 8
9, 10, 11, 12

Shadows dice game

1. Play white dice cards, numbered 1-3 totaling no more than 6
2. Roll that many dice
3. Use gray cards to modify rolls
4. Any target black card numbers matched exactly are scored

Grey cards:
+/-1
+/-2
+/-3

Colored cards
White backgrounds, color circles (inset shadow?) in corners with white shapes.

Red circle
Orange triangle
Yellow starburst
Green clover
Blue diamond
Purple square

2011 Five and Dimes

This year's game plays were far more focused than year.

Dominion has emerged as our group's favorite game, with many plays of all expansions. But even more than that, this year we focused on playtesting and developing my own board game, Hunt or Gather, which I have self published on The Game Crafter, in order to print on demand copies to send for blind playtesting.

Dimes

• Hunt or Gather 66
• Dominion 39
• San Juan 21
• Cribbage 13
• Thunderstone 11

Fives

• Castle Panic 9
• 7 Wonders 7
• Coloretto 6
• Eminent Domain 6
• Elfenland 5
• Witch's Brew 5

How I would fix Monopoly

There's a little contest going on, sponsored by a radio programming, asking HOW WOULD YOU REDESIGN MONOPOLY?. Here is my Answer.

My goal here is not to completely reinvent Monopoly. If you want to play a good game based on some aspect of Monopoly that you link, watch Board Games with Scott 070 - Breaking Up the Monopoly. The goal here is to fix the way people play the game, bringing it back closer to the original intent of the game. I have borrowed and elaborated on ideas from one or more boardgame podcasts.

What would you change about Monopoly? Should the game look different? How would you change the rules?

I would change Free Parking to Paid Parking. This will help to discourage the house rule where people collect a pot of all paid fines when they land on that space. That way of playing arbitrarily lengthens the game, making for a bad play experience.

As a flat tax it will hurt the players who are further behind, bringing the game to a close faster, one of the primary complaints with this game.

From a thematic point of view, this change to Paid Parking will make perfect sense to our increasingly urban population. For the growing majority, parking simply is not free.

What elements of Monopoly would you keep?

I would keep the rule that states "If you do not wish to buy the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder."

The only problem with this rule is that most people don't seem to know it. To encourage people to learn the rule, I would add a new space to the center of the board titled "Auction House", to make people ask the quesion, "what is that?" and look it up. The rule could even be written directly on the board.

Dell Dimension Cannot Find Hard Disk

After my ancient Dell Dimension 8400 got killed by a Trojan I was initially thrilled at my success in installing Ubuntu from a thumb drive and rescuing my data, but then I couldn't get Windows XP to install again.

I tried out using Ubuntu for a couple weeks, and I must say it's pretty awesome. But there are two show stoppers. First, I need Photoshop, Gimp is just, well, gimpy. Second, Netflix streaming does not support Linux. We could watch from the Wii in the living room, but the LCD in the office is so much nicer.

So I tried formatting the drive NTFS, FAT32, but nothing worked, Windows just couldn't see my hard drive. I located my drivers CD and pressed F6 during the initial setup. No luck. Finally, when I was about to resort to setting up a VirtualBox, I found this barely intelligible post in a dell forum:

Its a common problem with Dim 8400. what you can do is enter into BIOS and expand drives and goto sata operation and change it to RAID AUTO/ATA.

Posted by karthiktkv1 on 20 Dec 2008 3:00 AM

That solved it!