A visitor gives us a chance for some micro games

We are having a couple of out-of-town friends visit us, actually overlapping. And, while most of the time will be spent seeing sites and having quality toddler time, a little bit of gaming is going to creep in.

On the second night of Greg's visit, our toddler obligingly fell asleep early so we were able to get in a decent selection of micro games.

SHH, part of the Pack O Game series, is a silent cooperative game where you build words one letter at a time. You can only use each vowel once per word and each consonant once per game. 

I have to admit had low expectations for the game. And I really wanted to get it played because I want to play all the games in the first series of Pack O Games before the second one comes out. But, while I do have some I really like, cooperative games and word games really aren't a big focus for me. But we ended up having a lot of fun with it. There was a lot of tension in it and we played it a second time, where we totally bombed.

I then pulled out HUE, a tile-laying game that is my usual game to introduce people to Pack O Games. It is very fast and simple but the simple twist of getting all your hand at the start of the game and your last card being which colors you score makes it very solid. As usual, it went very well.

We ended with my homemade copy of Cunning Folk, which is like Coup for two to four players with just nine cards. Lots of lying and bluffing. Don't get me wrong, it is not as good as Coup. But the fact that it plays down to two and still gives me that feeling makes it a keeper. We got in two games of that and called it a night.

My past life with Palatinus

While it's not the end-all, be-all of my measure of a game, interesting decisions and how many you get to make is something I often consider and I think it is a big part of how engaged I am with a game and how much I am truly participating. 

Palatinus, which I consider to be a hidden gem, is a game that used to be one of my yard sticks for this sort of thing. It practically fits the model of a filler. I think we had games that lasted fifteen minutes. Very tight board, lots of interaction and conflict, bluffing and mind games. A lot going on in a small space and in a short time.

The theme, which is undeniably wafer thin, is about the founding of Rome. Basically, you are fighting over the seven hills of Rome. I guess whoever wins gets to control the future of Rome and the Roman empire.

The seven hills are made up of seven modular tiles, forming a hexagon board with one tile in the center. Each tile is a ring of six hexes around a center hex, with the ring being the spaces for tile placement. This creates a ton a of variety for set up.

Players take placing tokens on the board. Farmers score based on blue spring spaces and empty spaces. Merchants score based on the player tokens around them. Soldiers will either capture the farmers or the merchants around them, whichever group is bigger for points. But if they are the same size, the soldiers run away.

But there are a whole bunch of twists.

Some tokens have a wolf on one side, meaning what you're really placing a secret until scoring. And you only score after every token is placed, which means the whole game builds up to one big explosion at the end.

And you resolve each hill one at a time but tokens' areas of influence can overlap. A soldier might capture someone before their hill is scored. And a merchant might score a soldier and get captured by him later. The hills are marked A through G and you score them in that order.

Oh, just to make things more complex, each hill has a scoring token of three to six. The points that the players' tokens don't count towards their final score, just towards getting those tokens.

Palatinus is a very interesting game, albeit one with some issues. Not flaws or problems, just plenty of things that make folks not enjoy it.

It's a very dry game and not super intuitive. Check that. It is almost brutally non-intuitive. It doesn't help that all the conflict only gets resolved at the end with the game being very unforgiving of poor choices. If you like to learn as you go along, Palatinis will frustrate you. It's definitely not for everyone. 

But it impressed me, back in the day, for how many tough and downright nasty decisions it crammed in. It is a head cracker of a game, a puzzle and a slugfest all at the same time. And in a time frame that's shorter than a lot of lighter games.

These days, in the post-Love Letter world, that isn't quite so amazing. But it was a big deal for me and some of my friends. Sometime, I will have to revisit Palatinus. With the right group of coarse and in the right mood. Some games don't stand the test of time. It will be interesting to find out if Palatinus is one of them.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19876/palatinus

Thinking about the forty five minute space

Something that has really happened to me over the last few years is that I have become much more of a causal gamer than a heavy gamer. By that, I really mean I have gotten more into casual games rather than heavy games. These days, forty-five minutes is a meaty game.

This is a really a combination of a small child in my life and moving away from where my gaming circles lived. (To this day, I'm not sure if that's a remotely bad thing. It has let me focus on being a parent.) I doubt this is a forever thing but I hope that I remember the lessons I learn from this time.

It has also helped my interest in micro games and print-and-play but that's a long series of blogs in and of themselves. Heck, the rich variety of good games that that a half hour to forty-five minutes is fodder for tons of blogs.

Truth to tell, some of the basic building blocks of the modern hobby fit that time frame. Carcassonne with no expansions, Ticket to Ride, Bohnanza, Ra, Dominion all come to mind. Heck, back when I was playing Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico on a regular basis, we'd usually polish off a game in less than an hour. (Twenty minutes is the shortest I've ever seen a game of Catan but the winner's dice were on fire like a star exploding.)

One of the big lessons I have relearned is that a game that fits into this time frame can have just about any mechanic, have a solid theme and be full of interesting decisions and tension.

To be fair, while I've been using the term casual game to describe a shorter time frame, some of the games that fit into this time frame aren't  necessarily light or simple. Some of them can involve some serious play.

There are actually games that fit into an even shorter time frame that are still surprisingly heavy. While I'm not a big fan of TAJ, a five to ten minute game about adjusting the prices of rugs, it has a surprising the intricate framework. And that is just the first example that comes to mind. 

However, I do think that the game taking at least a half hour as a certain degree of heft to the experience. Playing a game that lasts around forty five minutes feels like I've really taken the time to play a game. Had a meal instead of just a snack.

In actuality, the number of solid games that fit into this time frame means that if I never get back into games that takes hours to play, I would still have a very rich and varied gaming life :D

The Golden Age - a study in melancholy

Kenneth Graheme's Wind in the Willows has been a part of my literary world for just about as long as I can remember. It's a profoundly charming and memorable book. So when I realized he wrote the Golden Age, a book I had vaguely heard of, it went to the top of my reading list.

The Golden Age is a collection of childhood reminisces. I don't think there's any better way of describing it. It's an anthology of short stories about a childhood spent in the English countryside that clearly was influenced by Graheme's own childhood.

I spent part of last year reading A. E. Nesbit's Bastable books and it's hard for me not to compare the two works. On the surface, they seem pretty similar. A group of English siblings having misadventures. But the Golden Age is from the viewpoint of a wistful adult looking back while the Bastable books as from a child's viewpoint.

I have been fairly harsh on the Bastable books. Those crazy kids don't seem to ever learn from their mistakes. But I have to say they are the better books. Oswald Bastable's narration, full of brashness and totally clueless, is a great literary invention. And the scrapes the Bastables get into are several levels higher than the scrapes in the Golden Age.

The Golden Age does do what it sets out to do. It perfectly captures an adult looking back at dreamy memories of childhood with a profound sense of distance and loss. It becomes downright mythic when he compares the distant adults to Olympic gods and muses how he may have become an Olympian himself. The Golden Age is ultimately a very melancholy book.

The Bastable books are written from the view point of a child for children. The Golden Age is about childhood but it isn't written for children. I may very well read the Story of the Treasure Hunters to my son when he's older but I don't see myself reading him The Golden Age.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/291

My old friend, the deck of cards

We will be going on a trip soon, one where I know we won't be having much (or any) downtime for gaming and not a lot of space in our luggage for games anyway.

But just like it is against my principles to not go on a trip without a physical book, I don't want to travel without a game. Even if there's barely a chance at then getting played.

Over the last year, my travel game library of choice has been the first set of the Pack O Games. Seriously, eight very different games that fit in a plastic case that I can easily carry in a coat pocket. But I can do even better than that.

A deck of playing cards

Seriously, a deck of cards is the ultimate travel game. Pick up any copy of Hoyle's and you will see a wealth of games that you can play. It doesn't hurt the playing cards of been around for centuries, which is given people plenty of opportunity to develop games with them.

If we do end up playing any games with them, it will probably be some sort of rummy or maybe Lamarckian Poker. But, really, the sky's the limit.

And if we don't end up playing any games and I'm just bringing a game along as some kind of charm or totem, a deck of cards will barely take up any space.

Of course, knowing me, I might also toss in Proton or Pico 2 :D 

Of Ricocheting Robots and Pyramids

OK, since I have been thinking about real-time, turnless games, let us look at Ricochet Robots, which I feel pretty safe saying is one of the classics of the genre.

Ricochet Robots is a speed puzzle game. One of those games where there are no turns. People just compete to solve the puzzle on the board the fastest.

You create a board out of four double-sided pieces. The boards both have both the goals on them and righty of different walls. It's not an actual maze but there are still enough walls to give the robots plenty of things to bounce off of.

There are four different colored robots, in the form of sturdy plastic pawns, that you randomly put on the board. Each turn, the goal is randomly drawn and players compete to find the shortest number of moods to make the robot that matches the color reach the goal.

Each move is moving any given robot. They move in a straight line, never a diagonal one, until they hit a wall or the side of the board for another robot. That ends the move. 

So, the game doesn't come with built in perfect solutions. Depending on the position of the robots in the gold it's chosen, different solutions will be available.

Ricochet robots was designed by Alexander Randolph, who was one of the earliest designers for modern game designs. He also gave us Ghosts and  Twixt, among other games. He was friends with said Saxon and I have heard that the two of them help organize the freelancers who designed 3M's game line. (They had a network of game designing friends)

I have also read that ricochet robots was a extensive redesign of one of his earlier games, Moonstar. Now, I have played Moonstar and so I can see the resemblance. At the same time, if he did redesign Moonstar into ricochet robots, is a serious improvement on almost every level. It's both much more intuitive and much more flexible.

But I really have to admit that I admire Ricochet Robots more than I enjoy it. It is a brilliant design, combining both a speed game with a very thought-provoking system of puzzles. It is like a party game met a brain building exercise.

But it isn't the kind of game I normally go for. I do think is one of the best of its kind but it rarely saw play and not everyone enjoyed it. So it ended up getting purged from my collection.

More recently, I discovered that Russ Williams (Hi Russ!) had made a Looney Pyramid variation on Ricochet Robots. All you needed was three monochrome stashes and a chessboard. Well, I keep a chessboard bandana in my Looney Pyramid tool kit so it took me two minutes to set up a game.

If you already know how to play Ricochet Robots, Ricochet Pyramids is beyond easy to learn. Put the chessboard down where everyone can see it. Randomly placed a small pyramid in each color as the robots. Randomly place nine towers made out of a big pyramid and a medium pyramid (one for every color combination with three colors) to serve as goals and terrain. With the remaining pyramids from the three stashes, draw one of each size to determine which robot has to reach which tower.

The real question is, does it feel anything like playing Ricochet Robots? The answer is it feels almost exactly like that.

The most significant difference, at least for me is that Ricochet Pyramids is played on an 8 x 8 board while memory serves me that Ricochet Robots is on a 16 x 16 board. The smaller board creates a  more tighter environment.

That being said, you could easily make the board bigger, even putting for checkerboards together if you felt like it. You could also add more colors in more robots and towers without changing any of the rules.

In all honesty, at least for me, the biggest question is would it be harder to get people to play this than Ricochet Robots? Let's be honest, homemade games don't have the same chrome appeal as fully manufactured games. 

But, the pyramids are awfully nice looking and chessboards can be as nice as you want them to. Really, a glass or mirror chessboard with the pyramids and you'd have something really nifty looking going on.

Ricochet Robots is a really fascinating design. However, it was not a game that I enjoyed for many of my friends enjoyed enough to keep. But, thanks to Russ, I can still experience it when I feel like it. Shucks, I probably will playing Ricochet Pyramids more than I would play Ricochet Robots.

Ricochet - not a great game but I keep it around

Ricochet or Leonardo or Picus isn't a particularly good game. However, it fits enough niches that it has stayed in my collection.

I first came across it as Ricochet so that's what I'm going to call it, although I have also played the Leonardo version as well. Frankly, the pinball theme of Ricochet probably fits it best but the theme doesn't really matter.

Regardless of its theme, Ricochet is a real time, turn-less puzzle game. Which means everyone is trying to solve the puzzle at the same time. There are other games out there that do the exact same thing, like Ricochet Robots or Set or Spot It.

The whole thing is just a deck of cards, which is why it's still in my collection. Each card, in the pinball version, shows four pinball bumpers, along with a pinball. The bumpers are red, blue, yellow and green (and contrast well enough my color blind eyes can tell them apart) and have numbers on them. The pinball is either big or small in one of the four colors.

Here's the game. Lay down five cards in a cross formation. The starting point is the center card. The color and the size of the pinball will tell you the next card in the sequence. The color tells you what bumper to look at and the size tells you if you are looking for the largest or smallest number. You then look at that card's pinball for to figure out the next card.

Every card can only be used once in a sequence and turn. There are no duplicate numbers so any given layout can have only one sequence. Whoever figures out what the last card in the sequence is wins that turn.

As I mentioned earlier, there other games that same trick of being puzzles that everyone is trying to figure out the same time. And, quite frankly, many of the ones that I have played have been better. Ricochet Robots offers up some very fascinating puzzles. Spot It is an ingenious design as well as a crowd pleaser. Jungle Speed is a raucous party. (Set, by the way, is very unfriendly to my color blind eyes and so I cannot physically put it.)

Still, it's stuck around on the shelf.

Well, the fact that it's just a deck of cards and takes up almost no storage space goes a long way to why It's still here. Ricochet Robots is a better game but a much bigger box so it ended up being purged. (There is a Looney Pyramids variation I've been meaning to try, though)

Games like Ricochet have an unusual learning curve compared to most board games. They reward reaction time and pattern recognition. And the only way to get better is raw practice. So different skill levels tend to be pretty significant. People who are better will constantly beat weaker players.

You can say that about any game. But lost a game of Go to a stronger player often teaches you something. Losing a game of Ricochet or other games like it is just practice. When they have a twist like Jungle Speed or Spot It, it adds that extra bit of fun. Still, I don't tend to play games like this. (Sorry, Ricochet Robots)

Most of the time Ricochet has come out, it has been as something for folks to do in other games with player elimination. It works well for that sort of thing, particularly since it is so relatively simple, even compared to other speed puzzles.

And, when the toddler is just a little bit older, it might be the quiet thoughtful activity to keep them occupied at restaurants or waiting rooms or the like. Make him think without getting him too excited. It might end up seeing some decent play then.