The Zen of Cellestial Body Maintenance

We tackled a large scale game in Starcraft this past month (though not nearly as large scale as Twilight Imperium by far).  Starcraft is an appealing adaptation of an enormously popular real-time strategy game on the PC.  We thought this would be an interesting game to study (much like when we played Doom) since it [...]

Filed under: Mechanics, Research

baseball adaptation

So, we’ve covered digital game-to-board game adaptation briefly in our game session in the past (re: Doom the Board game and currently Starcraft) and intend to focus more so on it in the coming weeks with the Starcraft board game. Ian Bogost posted recently about a fun find in board game history: http://www.bogost.com/blog/zimmer_base_ball_and_cigars.shtml

Filed under: Misc

Board Games Colloquium 2008

So, my visit to the board games colloquium was interesting. It is a distinct academic gaming culture (made up of historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, game theoreticians, and archaeologists) that has been gathering for over a decade. The quality of the talks, as expected, was pretty varied - but there were a few gems that [...]

Filed under: Conferences/Trade Shows, Industry News

Board game price fixing

From boingboing.net:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/27/boardgame-pricefixin.html
A board-game publisher has begun engaging in price fixing, a practice newly liberalized in the US in the wake of a June Supreme Court decision. Yehuda sez,

Filed under: Industry News

the analog experience

So, Ben posited the question earlier:
I’m wondering, since the computer does a lot of the calculations for you does that seem to take away the “mechanic”. Picking a skill to use and rolling die are taken away and made quicker decisions for instance in Doom. Does that add or take away from [...]

Filed under: Mechanics

Settling Down with Catan

We have played a game of Settlers of Catan as a five person game…which is fairly different of a game. All players can do more actions each turn. This likely was introduced to keep people involved in the game, as turns can be dragged out as players make difficult decisions. I have [...]

Filed under: Mechanics, Reviews

Wrath of Ra

We have gotten through two solid sessions of playing Ra, enough to constructively talk about the game but not enough to satiate our desire to play it. Ra is a fairly simple, easy-to-learn game that can be very engrossing after a single time playing it.
We want to discuss these games and answer key questions [...]

Filed under: Mechanics, Reviews