Jeez. While I was on the road, I wrote posts every day! Then I returned home. BAM! Nothing. Honestly, Mike said that things would get a bit more interesting, but they really haven't. I'm sort of just living my life day by day. Next week, I'm kicking things up a bit. I have to.
The job search continues. I applied for a state job (Harrisburg) and a job out in Columbus, OH. My grad school friends are awesome and I hope to make a trip out to Columbus to not only visit my friend Nate but also see a some other old friends. I am also working on an application for the Koch Associate Program, which basically plants you inside of Libertarian think tanks for a year prior to hopefully landing a job with one of them. Finally, the "game-printer" job doesn't seem to be materializing, and I am exploring some options overseas.
That's it for the job front. If all else fails, the US Census is hiring people to go door to door and fill out census forms. It beats what I'm doing now, and it surely lives up to my education.
But with all of this hoo-hah over with, my recent gaming opportunities have been plentiful and fun. On Friday, I went over to Kevin's house and gamed with Kevin and Jef. We played Chinatown, Cloud 9, Hey! That's My Fish, and Cloud 9. I also acquired Ghost Stories last week and have managed to lose 3 games. In addition to these games, I have played Fzzzt!, Cheese, Zero, God's Playground, and Mosaix. I have not quite gotten my weekly game group or my weekly Age of Steam groups up and running yet, but I am certainly trying. The number of AoS maps that I have and have not played is growing every day!
So How About Some Opinions:
God's Playground: I love Martin Wallace's games. He's designs gamer games and knows how to tap the gamer market. Heck, he has us using a subscription system! I pre-pay 3 games in advance without knowing anything about them. That is loyalty, and I really feel that Martin needs to consider this as he designs his games. And God's Playground, though it certainly has potential, is so bogged down by a rubbish rulebook that you really cannot enjoy it. But not only is the rulebook terrible, but Martin has done very little to help with the discrepancies and the ridiculous omissions. Gamers are an understanding bunch, especially when it comes to designers (though much less when it comes to publishers). No one seems particularly upset that this game came packaged with a rulebook that never should of made it out of playtesting. Well I am! And here is my rant. This incident alone is not enough to stop me from purchasing future games. But it is going to make me think things over twice before I make the plunge. Treefrog games are expensive, too expensive to take a gamble on even being able to play them out of the box. That's it for now. I won't write a review until I am able to play the game without having to makeup my own rules.
Cheese! - I picked up this simple dexterity game at Essen based on Nate's acclaim for the designer. The goal of the game is to flip a block of cheese into the air and hope it lands on it's side or it's end. Those two flips score the most points. If it lands on a large flat end with a mouse bite, your turn is over. Otherwise, you are allowed to flip again and continue to accumulate points until you decide to stop or until you blow a flip.
Sadly, the game is hardly a dexterity game. It is basically an activity that involves knocking a foam block into the air. I am not impressed.
Wypas - Happily, Nate said that he would buy this game from me. I didn't like it. The game had definite potential and needs a rules rewrite to fix up some loose ends. The goal of the game is to form hands that you can then meld for points. The first part of each turn is an auction where you can bid on a set of cards with cards from your hand. Then you play down cards into one of the 2 hands you are allowed to work on. But watch out! People can play certain cards that stitch you up. In the end, the randomness of the cards really got to me and the rules for the auction were so inane that I really couldn't follow them.
Fzzzt! - I played this game in London with Paul and absolutely enjoyed it. Then I brought it hope and played with 3 and had a pretty bad experience. In the game, a round consists of 8 robot cards being auctioned off. The number of cards that will be auctioned each go is based off the flip of a card. In our game, all of the auction lots were rather large, which led to the 3rd player ending the round without any cards. The game just seemed to go downhill from there. With no winnings from the first round, the 3rd player was out of luck for the 2nd round and never regained his position. I am not sure if this was a fluke or not and the game is good enough to merit another go. (Just in case you thought I had suddenly become a 100% game grump)
Ghost Stories - I last played Ghost Stories at BGG.Con and it has been on my wish list since then. I picked up a number of the promo items at Essen this year and simply decided it was time to take the plunge. Since the game arrived, I have played 3 games (1 solo, 1 2-player, and 1 3-player). We have not come close to winning yet, but I am having a good time. I wonder if it will continue to be fun if we continue to lose at the easiest level. Still, it is a quality cooperative game. It may suffer from the cooperative game flaw, which is one or two people taking over the game, but most co-op games will have that issue and the only real solution is to play with the right crowd (something most of us do anyways).
That's enough for now. As I wrote those very short "reviews" (if that is what you would call them) I did fell like I was getting my "groove back." So, perhaps I can anticipate writing more in the future. I certainly appreciate all of my readers and everyone who took the time to read this thing when I was overseas.
~Brad
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