White Dwarf - full circle

My weekly subscription to White Dwarf is churning along fine, apart from a few issues that went astray and which they quickly replaced. They are usually are later than they should be, sometimes not showing up until well into the second week following.

I got a letter from Games Workshop letting me know that White Dwarf will be returning to a monthly magazine.

The last weekly issue will be the July 30, and the first monthly issue will be September 2. Per the letter, since 4 of the weekly issues cost almost twice what the monthly issues will cost, they will convert my subscription and double my remaining period, plus three extra issues, plus an extra issue for the missing August. The said that this will now extend my subscription through to August of 2017.

The math seems a bit off but it seems to work out in my favor. I look forward to the new, old format. As long as they don't reset the numbering again.

My take on the next step of "better" games.

Tom, Sam, and Zee over at the Dice Tower posted an interesting top 10 list - Top 10 "Better" Games. In it they list alternatives for 10 of the more common ‘regular’ games. If you like the regular game, you would probably also like the alternative game. It’s an interesting idea – but a lot of their choices seem a bit too ‘gamey’ to me.

A lot of newer gamers tend to look down on these more mainstream games. But those of us who grew up before the wave of Magic the Gathering and Settlers of Catan tend to be a bit more open-armed about the ‘classic’ games. We played Monopoly, Scrabble, Yahtzee, and even Risk. We were there when Trivial Pursuit first came out and when Uno proved that you could get people to spend money on a Crazy Eights variant.

My take on the alternative list would be a bit different. It includes a lot more games that would bridge the gap between the mainstream ones and the more obscure specialty games.


Sorry! – a basic ‘take that’ style of game where you interfere with the other players’ pieces and send them home. Trouble is another basic example of this type of game. A good next step game would be Walk the Plank, or even Family Business. Both have you directly affecting the other players’ pieces and play quick enough to play again. Walk the Plank is pirate themed and the simpler game while Family Business is mobster themed and a bit more complex and a bit longer.


Uno! – is basically Crazy 8s. I’m not sure why they singled this game out from the deck of cards but I suppose enough people play just this. You could try Uno Hearts to advance the depth of the rules a bit or even one of the other simple deck games – Spooks, Canasta Caliente, Rook, or even Pit.


Deck of cards – they had this on their lists for Poker or Hearts. Any game that you can play with a deck of cards can be played with a Wizard deck. Besides the Wizard game itself which is a really good trump game, it is basically a deck of cards with 8 extra cards – 4 wizards, and 4 jesters. These can always be removed from the deck if you need less cards for the game.


Cranium – I haven’t actually played one of the many Cranium variations but it is a party game with many parts to it. Depending on which aspect you like of Cranium, there are games which match that. Some good examples would be Tsuro – a simple path making game that can play up to 8 people, and Telestrations – which is more of a party game where you each have a phrase that you have to draw in a booklet, and then pass those around for the next player to guess the phrase, and then draw it.


Scrabble – some people like the word making aspect of this game and some like the grid of it. If you like working with the grid, Quirkle is for you. Iota is similar but with much less expensive pieces. If you prefer the word making, try Quiddler – in which you make words from hand that increases each round but doesn’t allow people to take too long with their turns. Another good game is Word Thief which is older but has been reprinted recently.


Trivial Pursuit – a trivia game. Good replacements are Wits & Wagers – Family – where everyone answers and then you bet who answered closest, or even Timeline: Challenge – which has a variety of games to play with the Timeline cards included – where you have to guess the dates of when things happened.


Clue – a nice deduction game marred by an awkward way of having to move around the board. They do have a card game version that does away with the board and have made some variations in the newer Clue games to address this issue. They can also try Resistance – which is a great deduction game if you have at least 5 people or even Scotland Yard – in which one player has to hide their position and movements from the other players while using train, taxi, and the subway.


Chess – an old classic stylized wargame. Bosworth – is a nice variation that allows up to 4 players and the pieces all move similar to chess pieces. Go is and even older game with even simpler rules than chess but a higher amount of strategy available. Hive is a nice two player game with a lot of strategy and lovely pieces if you aren’t bothered by the bug tiles.


Risk – an area conquest game. Like Clue, it has come out with many variations that change the rules a bit. These players can try Diplomacy – which is a WW1 game that is often described as Risk without the dice. If they like the dice but want more complexity, they can try Fortress America or one of the Axis & Allies boxed games.


Monopoly – a much maligned trading/property game. Most people who have bad experiences with playing this game are simply not using the actual rules. A quick read through the rules may surprise you and might be worth giving it another try. If they like the property trading they can try Catan or even Catan Jr – which allows you to make trades with the board and is a little more forgiving. If they really like bankrupting the other players, they can try Acquire – which is a classic hotel stock game that is still in print.


Yahtzee – you try to get combinations on dice, keeping some and rerolling others. I am not sure how many people still play this one. There are a few variations of this as well, with Yahtzee Free For All being very the best – it plays quick and allows you to steal other player’s scores. But a good game to try is King of Tokyo – which is easier and quicker than King of New York. Both are giant monster battles using a similar dice rolling technique. This one wasn't on their list but deserves to mentioned as well.


If you find that the people you play with are stuck in a rut with the older games, or have family that you only play with occasionally, they can try these games. This should allow them to take the first step into a larger world of gaming and, if they like these, may allow you to expose them to even more esoteric games.

Books read - January to April 2016

Jan
Craft Corps by Vickie Howell
40K Planetstrike by Phil Kelly
The World of Kong – A Natural History of Skull Island by Daniel Falconer
Constructing Green Lantern: From Page to Screen by Ozzy Inguanzo
The Samurai Warrior: The Golden Age of Japan’s Elite Warriors 1560 – 1615 by Ben Hubbard
40K Cities of Death by Andy Hoare
Superheroes! by Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor
Fantasy Underground: How to Draw Vampires by Mike Butkus and Merrie Destedfano
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor by Newmarket Press

Feb
Byrne’s Complete Book of Pool Shots by Robert Byrne
A Fistful of Kung Fu by Andrea Sfiligoi
En Garde! – Swashbuckling Skirmish Wargames Rules by Craig Woodfield
Game Graphics – The Best New Video & Board Game Design by Charles Brunner
Wild Wild West: The Illustrated Story behind the Film by Barry Sonnenfeld and Jon Peters
Standard Book of Pool and Billiards by Robert Byrne
The Con Artist Handbook by Joel Levy
Model Soldiers by Henry Harris
Model Soldiers in Color by Roy Dilley
Fakes & Forgeries by Brian Innes

Mar
Lunatics by Dave Berry and Alan Zweibel
Creative Dollhouses from Kits by Robert Schleicher
Stage Costume – Step by Step by Mary T. Kidd
The Legend of Zorro by Bill Yenne
I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This: And Other Things that Strike Me as Funny by Bob Newhart

Apr
The Encyclopedia of Dollhouse Decorating Techniques by William Dansi, Caroline List, and Nick Forder
40K Battle Missions by Jervis Johnson
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzane Collins
Mockingjay by Suzane Collins
Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet by Stephen Segaller

Icebergs ahead

Back when I started getting into gaming, Dragon magazine used to include either a complete game or a module in every issue. One of the first issues I bought had Search for the Emperor’s Treasure in it by Tom Wham (Dragon 51). I remember redrawing all the counters so that I could keep my copy of the magazine in good shape.
This is where my deep love of Tom Wham games started.
File 13, Snits’ Revenge, Awful Green Things from Outer Space, The Great Khan War, Mertwig’s Maze, and others all had that quirky art and deceptively simple but elegant rules. My favorite of the TSR Mini-Games also happened to be made by Tom Wham – Icebergs.
While elegant, the small size does mean that a lot of people overlook this game. I’ve brought it to conventions, and we played it a lot in the day. It remains firmly in my top 10 games, but I always wanted to make a larger version of it.
With the extra games I have picked up, I can use one of the boards and recover it with the Icebergs map. I can either enlarge it or redraw it.

The game plays up to 6 players and doesn’t have too many components. I would like to do wooden ships, fuel and cargo markers, and then larger tiles for the ice floes and icebergs. Plus create a nice insert to hold everything together.

Top 100 Games - as of 2015

This is my list as of the end of 2015.

1 - Space Hulk
2 - Circus Imperium
3 - Family Business
4 - Diplomacy
5 - Warhammer 40,000
6 - Assault on Hoth
7 - Illuminati
8 - Icebergs
9 - Bosworth
10 - OGRE Designer’s Edition

11 - Walk The Plank
12 - Risk
13 - Survive: Escape from Atlantis
14 - Cash ‘n’ Guns – second edition
15 - Sushi Go
16 - Bang: The Dice Game
17 - Monty Python Fluxx
18 - Groo: The Game
19 - Race Day
20 - Highlander:The Card Game

21 - Crimson Skies
22 - Car Wars
23 - Scoville
24 - Heroclix
25 - Blood Bowl 3rd
26 - Fortress America
27 - Go
28 - Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit
29 - Conquest of the Empire
30 - Battle Masters

31 - Tsuro
32 - King of Tokyo
33 - Battleship Galaxies
34 - Daytona 500
35 - Rocketville
36 - Car Wars Card Game
37 - Camel Cup
38 - Guillotine
39 - Star Wars Miniatures: Starship Battles
40 - Horrorclix

41 - Hey, That's My Fish!
42 - Pitch Six
43 - Pandemic
44 - Blokus Trigon
45 - Cardline – Animals
46 - Blokus
47 - Timeline: Music & Cinema
48 - Spooks
49 - Bohnanza
50 - Zombies!!!

51 - Zombie Dice
52 - Cthulhu Dice
53 - Dilbert card game
54 - Rules With No Name
55 - Fluxx
56 - Shogun (Ikusa)
57 - Aliens
58 - Search for the Emperor’s Treasure
59 - Canvas Eagles
60 - Dragon Dice

61 - Pente
62 - Chess
63 - Girl Genius: The Works
64 - Elixir
65 - INWO
66 - Star Wars Starfighter Battle Books
67 - Quiddler
68 - Monsters Menace America
69 - Unexploded Cow
70 - Junta

71 - Toss Up!
72 - Risk: Balance of Power
73 - Star Warriors
74 - Martian Dice
75 - Yetisburg
76 - Risk: Battlefield
77 - Hive
78 - Chill: Black Manor Morn
79 - Filthy Rich
80 - Roll For It!

81 - Monopoly
82 - Resistance
83 - Canasta
84 - Wits and Wagers Family
85 - Scrabble Slam
86 - Iota
87 - Empire Builder
88 - Monsterpocalypse
89 - Colt Express
90 - Word Thief

91 - Qwirkle
92 - Yahtzee Free For All
93 - Blood Royale
94 - Heroscape Master Set: Rise of the Valkyrie
95 - Poo: The card game
96 - Bejeweled Frenzy
97 - Stack
98 - The x-files Card Game
99 - Nuclear War
100 - Scrabble


I am not sure how often I will go back and revise this but it was a good experience to have done it. I recommend it as a thought experiment to anyone who has played a bunch of games. A warning though - I know that it is making me look at my new purchases a little bit closer.

Top 100 games to 2015 - overview

I finally have my list together to the end of 2015. I went through the games played in the last 10 years that I had noted on BoardGameGeek and slotted them in to my list. There were 29 games that I could even not remember that were still important enough to find their way on to my top 100 list. Although none of these games ended up in the top 30.

A few interesting notes. 52 of the games on my top 100 list were published before 2000 and 31 of the games on my top 100 list haven’t even been played since 2000. I don’t have any games from 2015 on my list yet.

This tells me that I’m not really a member of the ‘cult of the new’, where I automatically rank the newer games higher. In fact, some of the newer games on my list may slide down over the next few years. I’ve already seen this with Get Bit, which would have still been on this list had Walk The Plank not come out and not only easily replaced it but hastened it’s slide off the list.

A lot more of the order games are pretty stable in their rankings. There is always the chance that a newer game may replace it but the older games are pretty entrenched.

Of the 856 game plays that I have recorded since 2006, 279 plays are by games in my top 100 list. This means that two thirds of the games that I have played in the last 10 years are not even in my top 100 list. This shows that I am willing to give new games a chance or even play games that I don’t love if someone else does.
About 20% of my plays were for games made before 2000, 37% of the plays were for games published between 2000 and 2005, 22% of the plays were for games published between 2006 and 2010, and 21% of the plays were for new games published after 2010.

The other thing about this is that it does make me look a bit closer when buying new games. If it's part of a set, or filling in a collection, I'll still get it but, if I don't think it will replace a game on my top 200, I have to seriously think about it. I still have a lot of games that could probably find a nice home on my top 100 that I haven't even gotten around to playing yet.

Wii Fit

While at Value Village, looking for games, I have occasionally seen Wii Fit Balance Boards but I could never convince myself to risk it for the $20 that they were asking. The last time I was there however they had a pair of them for $9.99 each so I figured that I would give it a try. I bought them both.

At home, with replacing the batteries, they both seemed to light up so I popped into PnP Games and bought a Wii Fit game for another $6. When I loaded it this morning, they both worked fine. I updated my profile, and it told me I weighed 301 pounds and that my BMI was obese for height. It also promptly updated my Mii to a more bloated version of myself.

I did a few of the balance exercises to start, but now I can work away at it.