Pizza Blog!

Found this on my door. Glad to see them on Blogger (http://zingpizza.blogspot.com/), but maybe I should let them know about our free custom domain hosting.

Also, if you're in Porter Square and like fancy weird pizza, check them out.  

Scavenger Hunt in the Graveyard

Getting Board-Gamey with Board Games #3: Play Against the Machine

For the first and second parts of this mini-series I talked about playing board games mostly with Cait. Today I want to cover some iPhone and computer versions of board games that have a single player mode against an AI. (Useful for when Cait is blogging.)

The iPhone game I’ve been enjoying the most is Renier Knizia’s Robot Master [iTunes, $0.99]. As a board game I can see how it might give limited enjoyment (its BGG rating is 6.47), but as a solitaire iPhone game it’s tremendous.

In Robot Master, you’re given tiles one at a time and must place them on a 5×5 grid. The tiles are valued between 0 and 5 points, and your score at the end is (Knizia-style) the lowest of all of the row and column sums. Two of the same value tile along the same row or tile scores 10× the tile’s value — lousy for 0 or 1, but pretty valuable for 4 and 5. Three of the same tile in a row or a column scores as 100 points, which is a great use of those low-value tiles.

The “deck” has six of each value, so in each game a random eleven tiles won’t be seen. This adds a good amount of tension as you get down to the last few empty squares and hope that you’ll draw that one 4 you need to go from 11 to 57.

Overall, trying to place the tiles to maximize their values across two axis — while not knowing what will come next — makes for a great game. It plays quickly (I can usually do several rounds during a subway commute) and is perfectly suited for the iPhone’s touch interface.

Against the computer, one player takes the rows and the other the columns. I haven’t actually given this mode a shot because going for high scores on solitaire has been so much fun.

Michael Schacht’s Zooloretto [iTunes, $4.99] is available on iPhone, for play against AI or human opponents. (There’s no hidden knowledge so it works for pass-the-phone.)

The presentation in this app is slick. Not only does it capture the feel of the board game pretty well, but it animates the animals as they’re hanging around in their enclosures, with particularly cute animations for the babies.

In the game itself, players play a series of rounds where they draw random animal tiles and place them on trucks. On their turn, players can instead opt to take a truck and put the animals on it into their zoo. The trucks are open to all players, so you need to balance making a truck that you want while not letting it be so good that another player takes it before you can. You only have a few enclosures, which hold one species of animal each, and you score by filling the enclosures up.

Zooloretto seems to be a fun board game (I actually haven’t tried it in real life but it’s now on my wish list), but it doesn’t translate to the iPhone particularly well:

• After you choose a truckload of animals for your zoo you pass all your turns for the rest of the round. That means that if you go out early, you still have watch the two, three, or even four AI players go through their thinking and choosing animations while you do nothing.
• The games are a little too long for a commute, perhaps 15 minutes, but you aren’t doing anything particularly memorable in each one, so there’s not much to call you back to a saved game.
• There’s a bug that occasionally pops up when you buy an animal from another player: the game will act as if you’ve taken a truck and you won’t get more turns.
• The app does not explain the rules of scoring or making coins particularly well. I had to read through the PDF of the board game’s rules, which is available on the designer’s website, before I really understood what was going on.
• I’ve had freezing problems that have forced me to hard-restart. This might be my phone, though. I just tried a full restore and will see if that improves things.

On my laptop, I’ve been playing Race for the Galaxy. The very clever Keldon Jones has implemented this excellent card game and trained up AI opponents to go with it. You can download it for free from his website, for Mac, Windows, or Linux source. (It’s built with GTK+ for cross-platform UI.) This is available with the blessing of the publisher, so the card art is all included as well.

Race for the Galaxy works brilliantly on a computer. It’s ideal for me because Cait doesn’t like game very much (I don’t either with only two players). And, though there’s an nifty little solitaire solution involving dice, mats, and a robot opponent that was included in the first expansion, it’s more impressive that it works at all, rather than being particularly enjoyable. I can blast through a game in 5–10 minutes and have a great time doing it.

The AI players make for fine opponents. Race is already toying with a “multiplayer solitaire” classification, so all you need out of them is to get respectable enough scores to be a challenge, and to pick actions realistically so that you can exploit Race’s single player interaction mechanism, which is to take advantage of actions that you didn’t choose but hoped others would.

I wasn’t a very good player starting out, but after 50 or so games I feel like I’m at the AI level. I’ve been adding in the expansions slowly so as to get comfortable with the cards before seeing new ones. Now I just need to stop coding through lunch so that I can play against real humans at work.


I have a few more iPhone games to talk about, as well as multiplayer online board gaming. Leave a comment if you like what you’ve been reading, and see you next time!

By the Tank

Having an awkward meal at Legal's. It's hard to eat while being stared at by fish.

Getting Board-Gamey with Board Games #2: More Board Games!

Yesterday I posted a bit in depth about some of the games that Cait and I have been playing recently. Those aren’t the only ones that hit the table, though. Here are some others:

• Lost Cities. Nostalgia! One of our first games, from back in San Jose. We brought it back out for the memories, even though we don’t like it as much as…
• Battle Line. More of the aggravating (in a good way) “should I play now or wait” than Lost Cities, plus more in-depth, tactical play.
• Ticket to Ride: Switzerland. An expansion specifically for two or three players, but we’d rather play the USA map and 1910’s Big Cities.
• Mystery Rummy: Jekyll & Hyde. Nothing exciting, probably a solid 6 on the BGG ratings scale. The Jekyll / Hyde mechanic is a clever addition to Rummy.
• Agricola. An old favorite. Still pretty. I seem score lower each game, though, I think from trying to over-optimize.
• 1960: The Making of the President. This one is growing on us as we get a feel for how it plays out. Unfortunately it’s not practical to track the electoral college numbers during the game. It is fun to run a pro–Civil Rights campaign in the Northeast as Nixon, however.
• Wits & Wagers. Go-to party game. This is usually the first (and inevitably the second) game I bring out whenever there are 5 or more people around.
• Wise and Otherwise. Brilliant Dictionary-alike game if the crowd is right. (It was.)

Thanks for reading! Next post: boardgames against the computer (or iPhone, a type of computer).

Getting Board-Gamey with Board Games #1: Board Games!

I’ve gotten back on a board games kick in the past few weeks, and it looks like I have a few topics, so I can do another mini-series. This one won’t particularly help you lose weight, unless you run to the game store for board games and then run home after you’ve purchased some. I recommend this course of action.

We spent some time with the 2009 Spiel des Jahres winner, Dominion. It plays like a simple CCG (but no booster packs to buy… almost), with the innovative mechanic that you draft cards into your deck as you play. Since your score is based on the value of the treasure cards in your deck at the end of the game, but those treasure cards are deadweight in your hand when you draw them, there’s a tension as you balance the ratio of action cards with scoring cards. Fun with probability was had by all.

I enjoyed this a fair bit for its innovation and also in the “methadone for Magic: the Gathering” sense. The combos are for the most part simple but can be rewarding to pull off. Also, the Chapel deck. Cait was not particularly drawn in, however, and will tolerate but not request this one.

We gave Small World a few plays, since it had been sitting on the shelf since its Spring release. We both like conflict and territory games and, although Small World is not a wargame, it has some (at least surface) similarities: each player controls a fantasy race that occupies parts of the Small World map, and during your turn you conquer even more territory with your pieces. Small World’s differentiating mechanic is that you can chose to abandon a battered race to the fates and start over on your next turn with a new, fresh one.

Though the random pairings of races with bonus abilities is clever and lends a bit of replayability by making each game slightly different, we’ve been overall unsatisfied. Small World’s strategic choices seem limited and its conquest is far too sterile. Other than a single, last-chance die roll at the end of each turn, you conquer territory merely by committing the required number of units. If you have enough, you’ll win the space. Cait and I both prefer the suspense, surprise, and thrill of deciding battles based on dice rolls. A defender who holds off wave upon wave of attackers with luck alone adds excitement to the evening.

I convinced Cait to give Tigris and Euphrates — considered one of game design legend Reiner Knizia’s masterpieces — another go. We didn’t even make it through one game.

Whatever makes this game great does not seem come across with two players, at least not two players who have not played the larger game and don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

I think our problems with this are similar to the problems we had with Java: the game comes across as a series of mechanics, with no overall guidance on how to play it. Though I’m reasonably content to lay down tiles and see what happens, Cait doesn’t have as much fun if she can’t find at least some strategy to execute.

The surprise hit of the past few weeks has definitely been Ticket to Ride. We’ve had this for quite a while (it was an early purchase due to its place among the Three Gateway Games alongside Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne) but it’s gone though a bit of a Renaissance for us.

The key to an enjoyable two-player game has been to use the Big Cities variant from the USA 1910 expansion. Those tickets all start or end in one of seven large (for 1910) cities, which bestows two gameplay benefits:

• Players are brought into conflict with each other around the seven endpoints. Though Cait and I aren’t particularly cutthroat with each other, knocking elbows keeps the game from feeling like multiplayer solitaire.
• Taking late-game tickets is a more viable strategy, since there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll already have at least one endpoint covered. (Especially since you see four tickets in this variant, rather than three.)

Our past few games have all been down to the wire, with train counting and big ticket gambles that have both succeeded and failed. We’re also evenly matched, which is more fun. The last two nights that we played it we were enjoying ourselves so much that we went three games back-to-back, which is somewhat rare for us for a game of this length.

Check out my BoardGameGeek badge to the right to see what else we’ve been playing, and come back next time for some more capsule reviews.