A reader writes:

I remember you mentioned that most of your gaming buddies were smokers. Does the odor of cigarettes get on your games? I know this sounds like a goofy question, but I remember [my wife] and I complaining about getting student papers that reeked of cigarette smoke, or lending books to people that get returned smelling like smoke. I don’t really consider myself to be uptight about this sort of thing, but I do remember that it could be distracting and occasionally overpowering.

It is true that I game with smokers. It’s also true that despite being a former smoker, I’m not crazy about the smell of smoke. Several years ago I was playing Magic with some friends and one went outside to smoke. When he came back in for some reason the smell got to me and I was told I literally turned green from illness.

It’s not unusual when seeing games up for sale or trade to see the owner describing them as being from a “smoke-free” house. People have complained about getting things in trades or from thrift stores that smell of smoke. Number one way to deal with that seems to be a dryer sheet thrown in the box. (I’m glad I haven’t had to do that since I’d be hard pressed to identify what bugs me more: the smell of smoke or the smell of dryer sheets.)

I don’t game anywhere where people smoke inside the house, though. So this really cuts down on the smoke-smelling on the games and on me, though sometimes when I come home from a long day of gaming I can smell smoke on me. More often I come home smelling of curry powder. My only problem with smoking and gaming is that it annoys me when a game (especially a tense one) is constantly interrupted for smoke breaks.

Also, what are the etiquette rules regarding a gaming group and wear/tear on the games? I mean, obviously you expect there will be some wear on your games, but are some people very particular about eating/drinking around their treasured games? What exactly is the most expensive or valuable board game you have played? Have you ever ruined or had to replace a game or game piece due to taco Dorito trauma?

This is another story. There are people who believe that no food or drink should ever come close to a boardgame. In fact, some have said that they don’t allow this in the same room. I and the people I play with are not in this camp. We regularly eat and drink around the games. We try to be careful and courteous, of course. Having chips around the games isn’t an invitation to smear grease all over cards, and it’s probably best if your drink isn’t right next to the board, but we’re not fanatics about it. But if someone new came to the table and asked that we don’t eat or drink around his games, we’d certainly respect that.

And sometimes there are accidents. There’s the Red Wine of Catan Incident, for example. Recently someone doused Southern France with beer in a spirited Power Grid game. And once during a Princes of Florence game I accidentally dipped a jester in salsa and ate it. But by and large these incidents are isolated, and in pretty much every case the game cleaned up well or well enough (our Settlers of Catan game wasn’t in great shape to begin with).

Personally I feel that games are to be played. The social interaction is part of the experience. My friends are more important to me than my games, and I’m not going to tell the former that they can only handle the latter with white gloves and tongs. I would expect some amount of respect, sure, inasmuch as you’d expect an amount of respect with anything of someone else’s with which you’re interacting. For example, when we’re playing Traders of Genoa I don’t hide my money in that place because it’s Al’s copy.

Thanks for asking!

My little Sunday game group just keeps getting bigger and bigger. One of our more recent additions is Eric C (not to be confused with existing member Eric S). For a game group, a new member not only adds another player to the mix, it also adds that player’s games, and Eric has been treating us to a bunch of new ones. Yesterday I got to play one of the games that is no doubt a jewel of his collection, Antiquity.

Antiquity is a game published by Splotter Spellen, a Dutch Company. It’s one of their signature games and, like all of their stuff, it looks utterly gorgeous. Every part of the game has a weathered, antiqued look to it. These games aren’t produced in huge quantities and they tend to go for a lot of money. As a result, Antiquity (and another of their games ‘Roads & Boats’) are games one hears about but doesn’t expect to play. So I was very excited to get the chance to play it on Sunday with Eric, James, and Rachel.

As its name implies, Antiquity (actually set a little more recent than actual antiquity) is a civilization-building game. I’ve never been very good at games of that type (even on the computer. When I tried to play Civ on the PC I would do OK until I got to my fourth city or so. Then there was too much to keep track of and I’d end up with one city building canoes for 400 years because I totally forgot about them.) but I was willing to give it a shot. It’s not a short game; our session took about four hours. And it has billions of little cardboard bits. It also can be mercilessly unforgiving, and a slight mistake can have horrific results. That might not sound appealing, but let me tell you, after you’re done, you KNOW you played a game.

If you’ve played ‘Settlers of Catan’ you know the gist of a Civ game. You start with a city and some resources, and you produce more resources to expand your city to gain more resources to expand and ultimately win the game. That’s pretty much how Antiquity goes, except things happen a little differently.

Here’s my first city (the big hex with the yellow Autobots symbol on it), with a few things going on outside of it:

And here’s what’s happening inside of it:

You use your starting resources to both build structures inside and start activities outside your city. Outside you can see one guy on the far left chopping down trees. The guy just left of center is catching fish, and the one on the right is just finishing up a mine. Inside the city you can see my granary, my storage (holding some wood and some stones), a couple of cart shops (they are where you go to do things outside the city) and the dump. At the moment one guy is working in the dump and two guys are in their houses (I had just bought those houses; they supply the workers you’ll use elsewhere.) I also have a Cathedral, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

Collecting resources is important, but can cause a problem — resources are finite. Once you chop down all the trees in an area, that’s it for those trees. You can then farm on the cleared land, but farming causes pollution — the red “skull” counters you can see in the exterior city photo.

There’s plenty of pollution to go around:

(And that’s just ONE of the pollution dispensers.)

After a while, things start to get a bit hairy. Here’s a picture from a little later in the game, when I have a second city. The pollution is really getting out of control.

The dump helps cut down on the pollution your cities generate, but not by much. Eventually you’ll want a Faculty of Alchemy, which allows you to clean up some pollution and thereby reuse land.

Pollution isn’t your only problem. The dark specter of famine also hovers over you. Every turn the people demand more and more food. If you can’t feed them, you get these:

Graves go IN your city, taking up valuable building space. If at any point you need to place a grave in your city and can’t, you’re out of the game. The only reprieve you have from this is the hospital, which removes graves. (I’m not sure I want to know how that works.) Some players have even built an extra city JUST to hold graves.

How do you win? Well, do you remember the Cathedral? Until you build a Cathedral, you CAN’T win. Once you do, though, you pick which of five saints you will dedicate it to. That determines your victory condition and a special power you get. Once you satisfy the victory condition for your saint, you win.

So how did I do? Well I don’t want to boast, but I won. Pretty sneakily, too. I built my Cathedral early and went for St. Nicolas. To win I had to build all 20 of my houses, which have increasingly difficult costs to build. However my special ability was, if I built a house I could get a second house for free. I was able to put together a house-building engine by constantly farming and clearing pollution from land. I got the Faculty of Philosophy to make it so I didn’t have to diversify my resources too much and a Market so I could trade for the things I wasn’t producing. I kept my pollution down by only ever having two cities, and since one of the things I was producing in bulk was food, my corpses never got to be too much for the Hospital to handle. By the final turn I was resorting to storing corpses in the University, but at that point I didn’t need it anymore, the game was mine.

I have to think I lucked out to a large extent. None of the other players encroached on my territory. I was able to stay confined to a small portion of the board, letting them fight over other areas. I had plenty of open space to farm in and still had enough room to dump pollution where it wouldn’t bother me. James picked a tough victory condition for himself (it has great benefits, though). Eric came close but seemed to run into some trouble about halfway through. I was never in very dire straits, though sometimes I cut it very close.

It’s a great game and I’m eager to play again. I’m not just saying that because I won, either. Congrats to Spellen Splotter for a fun, challenging and beautiful game, and thanks to Eric for hooking up with us and giving us the chance to play it!

I don’t want to quit completely, but sometimes I have to take a break.

My bar exam is coming up. I can’t be thinking about other things if I want to pass it.

Let’s face it: boardgaming is addictive, and it can be very difficult to stop. But now, there’s help:

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Thanks, MeepleDerm. You saved our marriage!

Ask your doctor if MeepleDerm is right for you!

Coming soon, MeepleDerm RP, specifically designed for role-playing gamers.

When it comes to computer games, I’m a cheapskate. My computer isn’t in any shape to play anything that’s less than two years old, and I don’t have the cash or desire to make it so. There was a time when I was willing to do some kind of upgrade every few months to play the new hotness, but those days are long past. But I do like killing time on the computer, so what’s my game of choice?

Diablo II!

It’s seven years old, it has almost zero depth, and isn’t much more than a frantic clickfest, but it’s the game I return to time after time. I can start up and just tool around for a half hour or so, or I can blow an entire evening on it.

I play online, though not with anyone else. I don’t know why I do this.

My latest character is a Druid, a character type I haven’t played before. My original druid was named Buggleboo, but after I sunk a bunch of points into summoning plants I noticed that the available plants to summon kind of suck. So I started with a new Druid named Uvula. Uvula is designed to do two things: summon a wolf and turn into a wolf.

Here he is hanging with his wolf and his girlfriend, Aliza.

She is not really his girlfriend, she is just his friend who happens to be a girl, ok? He says she’s not really his type but actually he’s just very shy and awkward when they’re not killing stuff together. I haven’t talked to her much so I don’t know how she feels.

Here’s a close-up:

That hand is your cursor in the game. Uvula is gonna go pick up that pile of PHAT L3WT at the bottom by the dead zombie. That zombie won’t be needing that gold anymore, assuming he ever did. YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, ZOMBIE.

Speaking of zombies, here’s Uvula in his wolf form getting ready to go claw one up.

He doesn’t even care about the little goblin guy next to him because he knows Aliza’s got his back. I don’t know where the wolf is at that point. Probably mangling some guy just off-screen. When Uvula is in wolf form he can talk to the wolf, but did you know he can also talk to him when he is in people form? That is what they teach you at Druid A&M. I’ve asked Uvula what the wolf has to say but he says he respects the wolf’s privacy.

READER RESPONSE QUESTIONS:

1) What years-old game do you still like to play?

2) Why do you think the zombie was carrying gold? What do you suppose he was thinking about buying?

3) If you could ask a wolf any question and have it reply, what would you ask?

Click for large Underground map

Still insanely busy at work, so anyone up for some Mornington Crescent? I’ll start with an easy move, for people new to the game:

Edgware Road

That should get things off to a nice start.

Also, let’s just play by Stovold’s Basic Rules (with, of course, the Sheffield Amendment.) To keep things simple.

We all write down the same list of a dozen of the dearest friends we have in common. Each of us then imagines himself crossing the steppes of Russia with all of them in a sledge pursued by a pack of hungry wolves, and has to throw them out one by one. Whom do you throw out first, whom next? You have to decide this, and number the names on the list accordingly, in the order in which you would throw out your friends to be torn in pieces. Needless to say you cannot throw yourself out. … The game provides valuable statistics, for all the marks we have given each person are added up afterwards. The man who gets the fewest is, of course, the least popular of our friends. When one list is exhausted you can start on another dozen, and after that make a composite list of the top six of each list.

From The Weekend Book, by Francis Meynell, first published in 1924 and recently reprinted. Russian Sledges is from the section on Games, specifically “Quieter Indoor” ones.

Recently I expanded my gaming horizons to include wargames, something I had not really dealt with before. I’ve enjoyed playing Twilight Struggle, Crusader Rex, Here I Stand, and Nexus Ops, and felt it was time to take the next bold step: buying a wargame. After doing a lot of research, I finally decided on this game:

O Deadly Swarm is a wargame for two players, set in the future. One player is an animatronic version of General Robert E. Lee. The other player is Smallpox. Here’s a picture of the map during play (so far I have only played it solitaire to learn the rules.)

As you can see from the counter sheet, Robert E. Lee is vastly outnumbered:

(There is one Lee counter, 348 smallpox counters, and one blank one to replace a counter you might have lost.)

Robert E. Lee is vastly outnumbered, but he has three things going for him. First, he has military training. Second, he is a robot. Third, this strain of smallpox can be hit with rocks and killed.

On a given turn, the player playing Robert E. Lee has a hand of cards he can play:

which give him certain abilities for that turn, or which can instead be used for action points. Action points allow Lee to move, fight, and attempt to look for rocks to hit the smallpox with. When he wants to find a rock, he rolls on this table:

Each player has two ways to win. For Robert E. Lee, surviving until turn 12 gives that player a victory (it is assumed that the airstrike he calls for at the beginning of the game arrives at the end of turn 12.) In addition, there is a barber shop on the map, seen here:

If he can get into the barber shop, he can shut off the computer that is creating the smallpox and therefore win. (Supposedly this is the hardest way in the game to win, and some people have even suggested a few house rules to make this more of a feasible strategy.)

The smallpox player also has two routes to victory. The obvious one is killing Robert E. Lee. This isn’t easy, because of Lee’s titanium skeleton. The Lee player has a beautiful color sheet on which to mark damage sustained:

In addition, the smallpox player can spend his actions to work on the lighthouse that the smallpox are building. If all ten stages of lighthouse construction are completed, the smallpox player wins.

The standard game lasts about four to six hours, but the rulebook contains two scenarios for shorter games, and a set of campaign rules for longer, more detailed games (I haven’t read this part yet, so I’m not sure what that involves.)

Although there were a lot of comments on BoardGameGeek talking about how spouse-friendly O Deadly Swarm is, Becky has seemed uninterested so far, so I’ll have to get Matt or James or Al to play against me. I’m not sure whether I want to play Robert E. Lee or the Smallpox first, but I’m looking forward to my first game either way!

My computer is not what you would call a “gaming machine”. Whatever the current hot PC game is, I guarantee I can’t run it. I probably can’t run the hot game before that one or maybe even the one before that one. There are a few reasons for this. First, my hardware isn’t really top of the line, and second, the PC game offerings haven’t inspired me to make my hardware top of the line.

Lately, though, I have been playing some games on the PC, and I don’t just mean Diablo 2. Dan turned me on to Puzzle Quest, which is actually for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS but has a PC demo version of it available. Here’s an idea of what it’s about:

It’s an RPG, but the “combat” is fought through a puzzle game like Bejeweled, where you swap two items on a grid to make lines of three or more like items. Doing so either harms your opponent or generates mana you can use to cast spells. I had no idea that the “item-swapping puzzle game” genre had become so huge and elaborate!

Unfortunately I finished the PC demo (downloadable here) and the real deal PC version is, at the moment, a pleasant idea that may or may not ever become reality.

However, all is not lost, because I have a second avenue for getting my item-swapping ya-yas out: Cradle of Rome.

The idea here is that you’re building Rome. Once again, this involves rearranging items on a grid, just like in real life Rome. In this case the items represent things you need to build with: food, money, and supplies. You can also, if you accomplish seemingly random tasks, add little citizens to your growing empire that will help you acquire goods faster. I got a couple of these helpful people but I have no idea what I did to earn them.

It’s not all just moving tiles. Another game I’ve been having fun with is Peggle, a game of a completely different type. In this game, you shoot balls into fields of pegs in the hopes of clearing out all the orange pegs. The balls ricochet all over the place. It’s fun and addictive, and what’s especially cool is that the game itself is like two rabid anime munchkins after a pixie stix binge: everything you do seems to freak it out and cause wild cheers and applause and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. I’m almost anxious about what kind of orgasmic paroxysms this game will launch into if I beat all the levels.

And finally I’ve also been enjoying the PC port of the boardgame Settlers of Catan. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available.

So that’s my PC gaming these days. Addictive little puzzle games and ports of boardgames. Mind you, if someone would release a Baldur’s Gate or Fallout, I’d play it, but that doesn’t seem to be anyone’s priority.

And now, I have tiles that need swapping.