Dear FA:

I’m the guy who in BGG rated Agricola with a 1 with the comment “Hello gentlemen. All your hype are belong to us”. I present myself with that phrase because being quoted as a “bannable offense” by an Eurogamer is the most remarkable thing I apparently have made on that site, apart from some rules translation and minor stuff.

Late last week, news began to spread that Heroscape, Hasbro's popular mass-market friendly entry into the miniatures arena, was being shunted off to Wizards of the Coast. 

I feel that the board game hobby is great and that our community is wonderful. Board games bring like-minded people together. I know, nothing is ever perfect and we can't ignore the bad actors, but on the whole, board game people, if I may address you all this way, are great folk. Playing board games is my happy place and I feel very much at home whenever I see board games.

In my never-ending quest to write articles that only a couple hundred people will ever read, I recently asked the advice of a fellow gamer for inspiration. He pointed me to a video from TED, that fount of ideas that makes everyone think they are an expert. In it, author Dan Gilbert poses the question of what makes us happy. You can watch his very interesting presentation here, but let me give you the condensed version. Humans seek happiness, but many of us don’t realize that we are actually capable of synthesizing it. We know that we are happy when we get something that we want. That’s what we call “natural” happiness. But suppose we don’t get what we want, or something bad happens. According to Gilbert, the human mind is capable of “synthesizing” happiness, accepting the circumstance and embracing its result. Have you ever looked back ten years later at a job you didn’t get, and realized that you are much happier for not getting it? That’s sythesized happiness.

The most significant development in the world of hobby gaming over the last five years has been the arrival of iOS and mobile platforms as a vehicle for hobby titles. It didn’t take long for classics like The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne to get a port to a mobile An iPad makes it simple to play against other people from around the world. Those of us who don’t use an iPad have fewer options, however. When I got a Kindle Fire for my birthday this year, I found that my mobile board game options were sadly limited. They’re getting better though, and Elder Sign: Omens makes a good case for putting more games on tablets. It’s slick, engaging, and expertly executed, and perfectly suited to the mobile environment.

Fun n.
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity.
- American Heritage Dictionary

1. The employment of time in a meaningless and non-practical way
- Arnold Rimmer (quoting Kryten)

When I was a little boy, I loved playing Monopoly. It’s quite clear from the stories and memories that you hear from a lot of board gamers (and pretty much anyone for that matter) that a lot of people hated the game as children. It’s also pretty clear if you look at the mechanics that a lot of this hate is due to misguided but extremely common house rules like pooling fine money on Free Parking and allowing anyone that lands there to collect it. We didn’t use any of those house rules, and that certainly is a big reason why I thought fondly of the game.

This is not quite a review.

Every week I take part in something that would have seriously troubled many of the people with whom I grew up. I set up a cardboard shield with a big picture of people fighting a dragon on the front. I unload a stack of hardcover books, gather a couple sets of polyhedral dice, and take on the role of Dungeon Master. My friends and I have been working through the Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of Annihilation. It's one of the highlights of my week. I'm a Christian, and I play Dungeons & Dragons.

Games tell stories. They can tell a big story of victory and defeat, of treachery, of despair, or even of how you managed to impress a king a bit more than the other players. But how they do it, that's the real question.

There seems to have been quite a bit of buzz recently around co-op games, what with the upcoming release of Kingsport Horror and the kudos that Pandemic seems to have been gathering. And after a member of the F:AT staff gave the latter a glowing review last week, I really couldn't resist dipping my rather large and nasty fly in the ointment and longer. See, as far as I'm concerned, no-one who is happy to play co-op games should be allowed to rejoice under the AT label at all. All co-op games are unconditionally crap and worse they're the antithesis of everything that AT ought to stand for. Here's why.

We know that those who play games are more mentally active as compared to those who play outdoor games. Doctors also said that gaming is good for us, but video gaming all the day is harmful for us. The bad effects of video gaming are, gamers mostly destroy their relations, lost a lot of money on purchasing games or getting accounts on gaming sites. They neglect most important obligation, and waste hundreds of hours. It is easy for us to end our gaming craze, if we follow these simple steps.

It’s a common misconception that when you have kids, you don’t have much time to play games. This is untrue: you don’t actually have time to do anything. Oh you may pretend that you still get to play games. You’ll buy them and promise to play them. You’ll participate in forum discussions. But you’re now the guy who goes to game night for an hour and a half, and then leaves early. But all is not lost! You’ve figured out a way to literally create gamers, and if your anything like me (i.e. a man) it was totally painless. So what better time to get started on those budding gamers than in their youth?

Take it from a guy whose children are at this stage, there’s no such thing as “too young” when it comes to creating gamers. Kids are enthusiastic and easily fooled, which is really all we look for when we want to make someone into a gamer. Besides, you’re around them all the time. Who are you going to play games with? Your wife? I’m pretty sure mine is still angry at me from that “painless childbearing” joke. And though your children can’t yet speak, read, or perhaps even walk, there’s no reason to start them on drivel like Candyland, Cootie, or 7 Wonders, all of which are highly inappropriate for intelligent adults. No, they’re ready for the big stuff right now.

So here are some simple ways you can adapt some of your favorite games into a bonding experience with your infant and/or preschooler. Don’t be timid. Dive in there and form them in your super-cool image.

Dominion

Dominion made popular every game publisher’s favorite genre: expansions. In this classic, players shuffle cards until they are done and someone wins or something. Dominion has nearly forty expansions spread across several boxes and parallel universes, and the true collector will break the laws of time and space to procure them all. Kindly, the publisher has never provided an adequate way to store all of these cards, unless you count requiring the player to add a new wing on their house as a way. This is a good thing, because it provides what is surely the richest experience of Dominion: figuring out how to organize your cards.

This is a great time to draw your kids into this particular sub-hobby. The best part is that kids know what to do without being told. Simply follow their lead. The first step is to remove every box and dump all of the cards onto the floor. It’s just that easy! Next, get on your hands and knees and inspect each card individually. Be sure that you have just eaten a fudgesicle and wiped your hands on your bare legs. If the cards don’t stick to your knees, go eat more fudgesicles until you feel sick. Then crawl back into the room and keep sorting the cards by placing them around the living room. Our family likes hiding them under furniture and in DVD cases.

Some will recommend card sleeves for this, but I find that they detract from the full experience.

Die Macher

Die Macher is a game that captures the thrills of (wait for it) the German electoral process. This may surprise you, but German children are politically savvy enough to hold office and host highly-rated talk shows. While we Americans prefer childish men to run our country, Die Macher is a great way to teach your children that the Germans do things in a different, and therefore wrong, way. Your kids can become well-versed in such timeless issues as sitting quietly and dropping pieces on the floor.

This last part is where the real joy of Die Macher comes in. You can make a race out of it, especially if you have two children, say ages eleven months and three years. The three-year old can sit at the table and efficiently (how German!) sweep all of the cubes and cards onto your carpet. Then the race is on! How many pieces can you get before the eleven-month-old crawls around and eats every cube on the floor? Just as in the more-alluring-than-it-sounds “adult Die Macher,” you can mark the results on a dry erase board for everyone to see. If there is a discrepancy in the scoring, keep in mind that there is a way to confirm the results. It’ll just take about 12 hours, some dedication, and may require you to make sure you don’t accidentally count any cubes from other games in the results. Or you could count them, and play an exciting variation on Wallenstein, but that’s for another column.

Pandemic

Matt Leacock’s 2008 cooperative design was a grand slam with people who like to boss other people around.  You must organize with your fellow players to find a way to keep the world from collapsing in a maelstrom of the sniffles and terrible nightmarish diarrhea. I can see all you parents nodding knowingly: odds are you’ve already played what I like to call Extreme Pandemic.

Extreme Pandemic is far easier than you think. Simply put your kids in daycare for about 90 seconds, and then bring them home. Their eyes should now be pink and crusty. Congratulations, Extreme Pandemic has begun. It has several advantages over vanilla Pandemic, in that the panic of spreading disease suddenly becomes far more real. Instead of passing cards to each other, you’ll get to follow your children all over the house and make sure that they don’t rub their eyes and then pick their brother’s nose. If you have already played the “Airlift” card and taken your kids to the doctor, you will have the added challenge of holding them down and spraying eyedrops all over their face. Please note that in this version, the “One Quiet Night” and “Resilient Population” cards are entirely ineffectual. You win when everyone catches it and you all need to stay home at the same time.

When that happens, you’ll reflect on how close you’ve all become thanks to board gaming. Perhaps you can celebrate by watching Go Diego Go for six hours straight and eating nothing but breakfast cereal.

Since I usually clutter up any thread here about any CCG with all my thoughts about how to play Magic on the cheap, and since I get PMs for advice every so often, I thought it'd be a good idea to do a write up on all the ways to play Magic for cheap so that I never have to do it again. 

I have a very clear-cut definition in my head of what constitutes a wargame. It's a conflict game which has either a historically accurate or historically plausible setting and the mechanics of which aim to produce some form of simulation, even if very low level. However it's obvious to me that this isn't actually everyone's definition of a wargame, as evidenced by the frequent inclusion on wholly unhistorical games such as OGRE in discussions of good introductory wargames. Ameritrash games are usually conflict based, and sometimes have historical settings and occasionally even make some sort of vague attempts at simulation. During my exploration of wargames I've started to see that there are in fact some fairly serious qualitative differences in the game experience that wargames offer and that it's this, rather than history, that a lot of people seem to be basing their definition of a wargame on. So I thought I'd use this weeks' slot to explore what some of those differences might be.

Money is fun, if you've got enough.  You can flaunt it.  You can taunt people with it.  You can hold fists full of it and laugh until your stomach hurts.  If you're in a rap video, you can throw it, one banknote at a time.

MattDP's excellent article about Monopoly reminded me about all of these things, and I'm a little surprised that, in the BGN comments section below the article, nobody mentioned them.  Instead, there's a bunch of analysis.  Is Monopoly a worthy game?  How hard is it to determine the real value of a property?  Is it true that it really only shines in a tournament situation, where competitors are gaming the tournament format more than they're gaming Monopoly itself?  And why do the sheeples always play by the terrible "Free Parking" house rules?  Can't they play by the rules as written?

Watch a kid play Monopoly, and you'll come closer to real understanding of the game's enduring popularity.  They'll clutch the money.  They'll run away into another room with it.  They'll lay it out into neat stacks, sorted by denomination.  They'll count it obsessively.

Money is fun.