Growing a Gamer: Alternatives to Candyland

...or why Hisss doesn't drive me crazy.

So our daughter is almost 6 years old she has been enjoying boardgames for a couple years now and it looks to have taken seed as an activity for the next few years. I often get asked by fellow gamer parents what we did to encourage the hobby so I decided I would throw together some thought on the subject and a few games for the younglings.

The first step is be excited about any game they want to play, this means you are going to play Candyland(seriously, be excited about it) at some point if they show interest in board games because a relative will buy it or you will be roped into playing it at a ply date. Be happy and excited that your child is interested, you can try and steer choices later, if you aren't happy chances are the kid will pick up on it and after a few fails the interest will probably die off. Nothing kills the drive for gaming than seeing someone playing a game in a lackluster way, especially if it is a game you wanted to play(so again, be excited).

Second do not hesitate to make changes to early games, you can often make house rules that will make the games easier to understand for games that push the child a little above the age range. The one thing to make sure is that the child knows you are playing by a modified set to rules. This brings us to the first game I will discuss: Hisss

Now Hiss is a game where you draw a card and play it onto the matching color to build a snake. The snake must have at least 3 pieces consisting of 1 head, 1 tail and at least one body section. The large the snake the more points it is worth. Now like most kids early game help them learn to take turns, teach something basic and teaches them sportsmanship. Now I decided to make the game a cooperative game at first, the goal was changed from scoring the more points than the opponent to completing all the snakes. This means we could talk through the turns and help each other make the decision and it made learning to lose easier since we lost together. We would try to make bigger snakes to beat our high score the next time we played the game so the goal was also a shifting number. This went on until I felt she knew the game and then I asked if she would like to try playing the game a different way and we used the standard rules. We still play by the modified rules every now and then but it is often the standard rules that are used these days.

So now when she suggests Candyland I will suggest Hisss, but if she insists I am happy to play a game of whatever she wants. Next time on Growing a Gamer: Alternatives to Tic Tac Toe

My Go To Publisher

So everyone tend to gravitate towards a favorite designer from Feld to Friese, looking from Lang until Uwe but sometimes companies are so in sync with what you want from a game that they end up feeling like home. I thought I would take a moment to talk about my favorite publisher:

Most of the games they have published over the years have been on the heavy side but that is what I love about them. I can always depend on the game to be deep and crunchy and yet approachable from a rules stand aspect.

Some of the games that I find myself going back to are Vinhos, Madeira, Signoire, Vasco Da Gama, ZhanGuo, Asgard and Nippon. I only own a few myself but I jump at the chance to play other people's copies of them and I have enjoyed them everytime. I am looking forward to Brasil and Railroad Revolution. The company has seemed to developed a a relationship with designers who like push people with a hard choice and allowing a limited amount of choices to means something. Well done.

Tiny Living, Tiny Gaming

So eventually we would like to move into a space with 600 sqft or less indoor living space. We have always been able to keep our collection around 60 games but if you had to cut down to just 5 games what would they be and why, here is the result of my list. Now these will not be games with a small footprint or our favorite games but games that I feel would see the most play with us and our group of friends being the focus, I also tend to store expansions in the main box so that does give the edge to games with a library of expansions released. So here is the current list of games that I will be working with so we will be keeping 5 of them, kids games are already removed because they serve a different purpose but we would trim those down to a handful as well.

Alhambra: Big Box
The Castles of Burgundy
Chess
Codenames
Concept
Coup
Crokinole
Dixit
Doomtown: Reloaded
Elysium
Felix: The Cat in the Sack
Fire in the Lake
Firenze
Fleet
Fleet: Arctic Bounty
Founding Fathers
Ginkgopolis
Go
Gold West
Grand Austria Hotel
La Granja
The Great Heartland Hauling Co.
Guilds of London
Hanabi
Hive
Imperial Settlers
Keyflower
King Chocolate
King of Tokyo
Lords of Waterdeep
Love Letter
Luna
Machi Koro
Madeira
Mombasa
Myrmes
Mysterium
Nations
Orléans
Pandemic
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Qwirkle
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island
Saint Petersburg
Seasons
Shipyard
Snowdonia
Splendor
Star Wars: The Card Game
Suburbia
Sushi Go!
Taluva
Terra Mystica
Terror in Meeple City
Tokaido
Trajan
Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
Vikings
Vinhos
Washington's War
Wok Star

In no order the games would be:

Star Wars: The Card Game

This is pretty much the game for just the two of us, with all the expansion in the box it hits deck building and keeps itself fresh enough for me. The game has some interesting decision trees and has the added benefit of being set in the Star Wars Universe.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

Hits all the co-op needs that we have while still being fun and thematic, again all the scenarios and even the fan created content just means the game will have a long shelf life. The risk element to trying to do more actions with your limited resource pull and rolling to see if things are accomplished weighed against taking less actions with assured success makes for fun debate and adds some chance to the game.

Orléans

A bag builder game that has really tight game play at all player counts combined with different roads to victory makes for a great game. The fact that the mechanics are easy to teach but give the game an incredible depth of strategy make it an easy include on such a short list. I hope that the expansions can live up to the high standard the base game has set.

Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar

Another game with easy to teach rules but has a lot of variety with in the rule set. The game is about timing and knowing what you need to do, two simple things that the moving action slots and other players can change from turn to turn. So many games have come down to over extending by one worker or missing a chance to pull a worker to set up future turns. The expansion adds so many little changes that can all be thrown in or just a module at a time to keep things fresh by adding another level of decisions to the game.


Box of Delights

The biggest cheat on the list, we have our Dixit, Codenames and Mysterium all stored in one box, this is pretty much geared towards our game nights as Mysterium and Codenames have been really popular among the group. Dixit serves to freshen up both games and serve as another game by itself.

--Games for the youngling--
Animal Upon Animal
Feuerdrachen
Heart of Attraction
Monstertorte
Pharaoh's Gulo Gulo
PitchCar Mini
RattleSnake
Rhino Hero
Ticket to Ride
Unicorn in the Clouds
Viva Topo

We would probably end up with:
Rhino Hero
Pharaoh's Gulo Gulo
Ticket to Ride


All are fun for adults and can be competitive as she grows.

So there are my five, what are yours?

Doomtown: Reloaded...

...or the failed Harrowed pull.

When Doomtown: Reloaded(DTR from here on) was announced I was over the moon with excitement. I want to breakdown my perception of the time line and make some suggestions that might have made the game more approachable(but definitely a different beast). The game came out at GenCon 2014, even with streamlined rules people struggled with DTR, despite having a strong showing at GenCon it never really had solid traction to build a large player base. My first change would be the attachment rules, I would not require the location to be controlled by the player trying to attach the goods. Often during demos I would have to stop players from attaching something because another dude had moved to the location to take control of it. While this does limit some of the chess aspect of the game I think it would have help to streamline the game and eliminate some of the more awkward growing pains of the movement game and made camping town square a little more involved since you could play goods onto dudes in the town square. This would have also opened up design space for goods and spell removal in the core set. Another core rule I would make spells boot the caster after use so deathstar type dudes are limited. The next streamline I would make would be to remove the public and private from deeds, every deed would be private in the sense that if you did not own it and called someone out they would incur the bounty of that action. Again try to limit the small book keeping of the game without changing too much of the core.

So we had a few local events but nothing ever took off, having both Landslide and Clown control as strong early archetypes led to most of the field playing one form of control or another and made the game look like some sort of sprawling chess game that more than one person just decided it wasn't their thing. So you had Sloan Rush as one of the other consistent decks, so the Law Dogs needed to be good, I don't play as much these days buy I think I am still waiting for this to happen. So my changes for the core set, Allie gets an upkeep and Influence making her less likely to show up out of faction and a higher upfront money investment. I think the core rule change to spell would slow Clown control enough for the other groups to keep up. Landslide I think is easier to play against than some of the other archetypes and with the ability to drop goods on dudes at deeds you do not control does give you some design room if it stayed a problem. Now Law Dogs, how to make them good in the core with just an idea and no testing is a tall order; I would start by making the home ability make it so your dudes don't become wanted when calling out dudes or preforming jobs, this shows the laws ability to serve warrants and preform tasks that would get the common folks thrown in the hoosegow. That along with keeping the ability to make dudes wanted should help give them a unique feel. Next is the income problem, always seemed to be short on money but being able to transfer a bounty onto the home for permanent income could be an interesting thematic fix but would need to be tested.


Exposure, after GenCon the hyped died, at the first Origins after the release there was no real push to demo the game to anyone. They didn't even have a banner. AEG has always been rather hands off with the tournament scene in all of their games I was just hoping for a little more support than I saw. The game seemed to be selling well at all the stores I visited but the AEG reps(I think they are called Vanguards now) in the area were unfamiliar with it and did not want to invest the time to run events and the stores were just okay with selling packs. So I ran 4 events and 2 demo nights at a FLGS but I could never get a consistent night off to really anchor a day so no luck with home growing a play group. This past year's Origins rolled around and I decided to skip DTR because two of the Origins events from last year that I played in only had one other person show up in one event and I was the only person in the other events. The main event was well attended both years but I had an event during the same time this year. After the event the cancellation was announced, which would have made it the sunset ride for me since I don't go to GenCon these days. AEG could have done a lead up announcement before Origins and at least let the community have a few more chance to say goodbye.

Anyway, those are just a few postmortem thought I had about the game.