If you want to play with Pentominos, you need to look at Katamino

At its heart, Katamino is a set of Pentominos. 

A Pentomino is a geometric shape that is made of of combining five squares. There are twelve possible shapes you can make this way. They even have a naming convention after the letters each one resembles the most closely.

To be honest, I actually learned a lot of what I know about Pentominos from the kid mystery book Chasing Vermeer. One of the two kids carries a set around and uses them as a thinking aid. I had seen them in games like Blokus before that but that book got me thinking of them as their own idea.

For all intents and purposes, Katamino is a tool box of activities you can do with the Pentominos. It comes with a tray with a spacer so you can make different sized areas to work with. There's a book of puzzles that you can solve with the Pentominos, as well as some smaller blocks to fill in spaces for certain games.

The games include a speed puzzler, like Ubongo, and a tile-laying game kind of like Blokus. But, so far for us, where it really shines is just as a puzzle. Neither Carrie or I are that into puzzles but we've definitely enjoyed the Katamino puzzles and there's a ton we haven't done yet.

On the one hand, I have to admit that I don't think that Katamino does anything in particular special. The actual games cover ground I've seen before (and, at least in the case of Blokus, done better) The puzzles are fun but Katamino didn't invent Pentomino puzzles.

BUT, where Katamino shines is in the quality of the components. This is not the first set of Pentominos I've owned but it is by far the best made. I've had ones made put of cardboard or plastic. Katamino's are made out of chunky, thick wood. These are solid blocks.

They are easily the most durable Pentominos I've ever used by far. And, since they are so thick, you can make three-dimensional structures out of them, which is actually one of the kinds of puzzles. Our two-year-old is still too young to do the puzzles or play the games but he loves building with them.

Katamino would not be my first choice of abstract games to buy. However, as a casual solitaire puzzle and as a family activity, it really sings. It's not something I'd pull out for hardcore gamers but it's something I can see us as a family enjoying for years to come.

DISCLOSURE: I was sent a review copy of Katamino (Thanks!) but I don't have any official connections with Gigamic.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6931/katamino

Finding deeper meaning in the Story of the Treasure Seekers

I'm a big fan of A. E. Nesbit's Psammead trilogy. It's one of the cornerstones of modern children's fantasy, even if I have to always look up how to spell Psammead. So I decided I needed to read more Nesbit. After all, so much of what she wrote is now public domain so I really have no excuse.

So I decided to read her first children's book, The Story of the Treasure Seekers.

To be honest, I found it fairly tough going at first.

The Story of the Treasure Seekers doesn't have any fantastic elements. Instead, it describes how the six Bastable children look for pocket money after their mother dies and their father's business is almost defrauded out of existence. Through a combination of having too much imagination and less common sense than the average brick, their various plans, which include selling wine, making patent medicines and becoming bandits, result in wacky hijinks. 

And here's where I started having problems. The family is in serious shape. Their mother is dead and their dad is clearly on the verge of bankruptcy but the kids seemed to never stop being jolly and silly. And with six of them, the oldest ones, at least, should have some kind of clue.

Looking back at the first chapter, the youngest Bastable is eight. Yeah, these kids are definitely too old to not to realize how serious their family situation is.

However, two things made me end up making an alternate interpretation to their silliness. One is that the narrator, Oswald, is a hysterically blatant unreliable narrator. That puts their whole jolly attitude in question.

And, here and there, there are little comments that make it clear that the Bastables don't want to talk about or even think about their dead mother. It also becomes clear that many of the adults who they encounter deeply pity them.

I found myself reading the Treasure Hunters not as the misadventures of six somewhat dim and possibly deranged kids but as six kids who are deeply traumatized and desperately trying to cope with the way their entire world has fallen apart. Not nearly as funny. Actually kind of dark, really. However, it made the kids a lot more sympathetic for me. 

Seriously, I slogged through the first three and a half chapters. Found it dreadful and put the book down for months. Picked the book up again, came to my alternate interpretation and blazed through the rest of the book in a sitting. Heck, it's really not an alternate interpretation. It's all clearly there.

With that in mind, the theme that now comes through the book is family. Through all of their trials and tribulations, the Bastables hold together as family. In the end, they resolve their problems by bringing their uncle into their family.

The Story of the Treasure Hunters is not going to be one of my favorite Nesbit books but it did have more layers and depth than I was prepared to credit it at first.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/770q

Prince Valiant the RPG might return?

While I usually just look through Kickstarter for boardgames, I do look at the role playing games and was surprised to see that a revised edition of the Prince Valiant Storytelling Game from 1989 is getting Kickstarted.

Over the years, I've regularly heard about the Prince Valiant RPG and been interested in looking at it. At the time, it was a revolutionary design. Unfortunately, it's been really hard to get a hold of a copy so I've never actually read it.

(I also have to admit that I've never been a fan of Prince Valiant, largely because it's never been carried in a newspaper I or my parents have gotten. I have always thought the artwork is pretty, though)

The two goals of the Prince Valiant RPG were to be a simple system that was extremely novice friendly and to still give a rich, thematic experience that reflected the comic strip the game was based on.

Did it do a good job? Since I've never read the book and I don't know anyone who's played the game, I can't tell you. However, the game is still remembered. It may not have gotten reprinted but it hasn't disappeared into obscurity.

Prince Valiant didn't invent the idea of simple rules that would be easy for non-gamers to pick up. The Ghostbusters RPG did that in 1986 and Toon did it even earlier in 1984. Still, in 1989, the idea was still an outlier as opposed to an accepted school of design.

The actual mechanics are dead simple. Characters have two statistics (one for physical stuff and one for social stuff) and access to a fairly small and focused skill list. Add up the numbers between stats and skills and flip that many coins with heads being successes.

But that's not what interests me. How was it presented? What was the GM section like? How was Prince Valiant the story integrated with the game?

The fact that it was designed by Greg Stafford, who also was a major designer of Pendragon, the definitive King Arthur game, as well as a lot of other stuff (including that newbie friendly Ghostbusters RPG I mentioned earlier) is a major interest point. It was made by someone with serious RPG chops.

How well has it aged? I don't know. But I am curious enough that the Kickstarter tempts me.

Do I like older games better?

Looking at the way I purge my game collection, it sometimes feels like I'm keeping a lot more older games. It makes me wonder if I'm letting nostalgia be a major factor in what I'm keeping.

And nostalgia has helped some games hang on. My box of most Cheapass Games catalog speaks to that. It doesn't hurt that they take up less space than my Ticket to Ride collection :D

But older games like Catan or Ticket to Ride or Through the Desert or Ra or Bohnanza all have a firm place in my collection, not going anywhere, and my oldest cat is younger than the youngest of them. (To be fair, neither of the two tabbies who came from the same litter are that old)

However, to be fair again, I've also gotten rid of a couple hundred games that are that old. I think that what I'm really looking at are games that have really proven their staying power. They're games I've played lots of times and want to keep on playing.

I used to be part of the Cult of the New, trying every new game I could. However, these days, I'm part of the social club of the tried and true. (It's a fair bit less formal, really)

At the same time, I have to admit that I do prefer what some folks call German Family games, as opposed to Euros. And sometimes it feels like there was a golden age for German Family game about ten, fifteen years ago and it's more of a golden age for Euros. I bet there are brilliant German Family games being made right now and I just don't know where they are. Like Bigfoot, only with meeples and cards.

In the end, I'm keeping games that I want to keep on playing. And if I've kept on wanting to play them for years, I've kept them.

An outsider's look at Pokemon Go

Unless you count playing boardgames online, I'm not much of a video gamer. However, I did marry a video gamer, which helps round out our household nicely.

So I am actually aware of Pokemon Go. Otherwise, I would just think I was seeing a lot of people reading deeply meaningful texts all at the same time.

As a non-video gamer and a dad, I have a lot of appreciation for Nintendo. As a company, they seem to really encourage family friendly fun and activities, including encouraging kids to get some exercise. And they gave me Professor Layton. That's a franchise I can really sink my teeth into.

For everyone who is like me, Pokemon Go is a game that combines hunting and live trapping cute little monsters with GPS. You actually have to get out of the house and hunt the Pokemon down on foot. 

I've been calling it Pokemon the LARP.

I actually consider this to be pretty brilliant. I understand that the game eats battery power like it was going out of style and probably isn't that good for data plans. I know folks have wandered into bad neighborhoods looking for Pokemons and a Wyoming girl found a dead body (which sounds like the start of a weird crime drama - They collect Pokeman and Evidence!)

However, I like that it encourages kids to get off the couch, go outside and explore their environment, along with getting some exercise. Plus, the idea of creating a mashup of the real world and virtual reality is still new and exciting, even if other games like Ingress have already done it. 

The other night, I saw a group of people standing outside a closed library, staring at their phones. I wanted to pull over and ask them what faction they were in.

I don't know if Pokemon Go will be a two-week phenomena or a lasting game or a sign of games to come. If nothing else, it's a fascinating social experiment and an infesting idea for a game.

Game storage solutions

In addition to flat out getting rid of games as part of making room in my son's closet, I've also gotten into the habit of just getting the boxes. That does kill the resale value so I try to stick to games that I'm not planning on getting rid of.

Let's face it, some game boxes hold a lot more air than game. One of the more extreme examples for me is Augustus. Definitely a game that I want to keep but it took up a fraction of its Ticket to Ride-sized box. It now shares a box with Blue Moon City and Paris Connections. Three games I know I want to keep on playing that take up a third the storage space.

The downside is that I have to consult a chart to find some game :D

The single biggest boon was buying a couple of cases of photo boxes. Carrie  originally for me as a storage solution for Dominion but Dominion spread out over a whole bunch of little boxes proved to be a logistical pain. However, each individual box works just fine for individual games. You know, as long as they can fit.

Which is a surprising number of games, quite frankly. I've filled two cases with games, which has made for a dandy storage solution, not to mention a fairly portable game library. Although, at the moment, my plastic case of Pack O Game games has been my traveling library, since it'll fit in a large pocket.

Of course, a side effect of this is I have to be careful where I store these games. Condensing makes the boxes a lot heavier!

4X and its shifting meanings

I feel like I'm seeing the term 4X used a lot more often than I used to, like its the new thing.

Which seems kind of odd. After all, while the term got started in video games, it's been around in practice in board games since at least the 70s.

The term refers to Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. Exploring means finding out what the map is. Expand means creating some kind of infrastructure, usually settlements and the like. Exploit means using the resources you find, almost always involving a tech tree. Technically, Exterminate means fighting and eliminating other players but it seems to just mean fighting these days.

As a genre, 4X really seems to have taken hold in the video game arena, which is where the term was coined in the first place. Basically, we're talking about in depth empire building. The term usually implies a big scope and a high complexity.

Over the last few years, what seems to have become a goal is create shorter and more accessible 4X board games. The first time I really heard the idea bandied about was with Eclipse, which described to me as Twilight Imperium for people who only want to play Euro games.

When it really struck me was when Tiny Epic Kingdoms, a 4X game that can fit into a really big pocket and take about a half hour to play. And now there's even a travel version that will fit into just about any pocket. 

And when I got a chance to play Scythe, it was described to me as a 4X game that combined the sensibilities of Ameritrash and Euro. It sure seemed to live up to that description.

It seems to me that the term 4X might be changing or shifting, making it harder and harder to definitively pin down what is and what is not a 4X game. In particular, the Explore and the Exterminate aspects seem more nebulous to me. 

With computers, the ability to create new maps and ones that are filled the fog and the unknown is a lot bigger than what you can do with a board game. Heck, in Scythe, a major component to the exploration experience are encounter tokens, which are one-shot multiple choice benefits.

And, as I already commented, Exterminate originally meant just that. Wiping someone off the map. Now, it seems to just mean fighting. With a loose enough definition of fighting to include siccing the robber on someone, someone could argue that Catan is a 4X. Not that I think anyone could actually get away with that argument.

I got curious and looked up if Nexus Ops was considered a 4X game. And I found that it was not. While it does have exploration and exploitation and even extermination, it does not have expansion. Which makes sense. Your forces really just squat on mines. You don't build any infrastructure.

Ultimately, what I'm getting out of 4X becoming a more common term is that the term has gotten more vague and not everyone is going to agree on what qualifies.