Visiting Michael Schacht's site

Back when we became parents and moved across the country at the same time, I made a decision to cut my online gaming sites down to Yucatá. I didn't have the time or focus to play games on a bunch of different sites. Yucatá, between having a wide selection of games and a great community that includes some of my face-to-face friends, was the perfect choice for me.

Since then, the only site that has slipped back into regular rotation for me is Super Duper Games, home of obscure and curious abstracts. Seriously, between its perpetual beta status and unique selection of games you've never heard of, it is like nothing else on the web or face-to-face life.

However, I will go to other sites for the purpose of trying specific games. For instance, I went back to SpielbyWeb to try out Reef Encounter in order to find out if I should keep my hard copy. (The answer was a giant yes)

My recent musing about Michael Schacht made me decide to go back to boardgames-online, his personal site to play his games. After all, so many of his games really need at least three players to either shine or just play.

It is actually quite a nice site. It has good interfaces that are easy to use and it has a surprisingly wide selection of his games. The only thing I can knock about it is that it doesn't have the largest community, which I think is of the most important thing for an online gaming site and the most difficult thing for one to achieve.

Although Michael Schacht himself will show up and play games, which is pretty darn awesome.

Keeping to my original plan of not spending too much time playing board games online, I'm planning on playing only one or two games at a time at the site. My need to make sure that I have a good time management hasn't gone away.

Although my original plan of just playing a couple games and then leaving the site might get adjusted because there are games there I don't know and it would be fun to learn them.

This is just one more of the many examples in my experience of Michael Schacht being a ninja game designer. Despite winning awards, he doesn't seem to have his own call to personality. However, he makes really good games.