A fine dinner – I ate so many peppers I was slurring words. I should put myself through this abuse more often.

Played 3 games of Axiom and lost them all – I blame low blood sugar from an overly replete belly! Axiom is both less and more than I was expecting; a fine but not terribly engaging combinatorial game. I still somewhat wish Axiom were the game I imagined it to be on first sight, a game of moving pieces about the entire exterior surface of a constantly changing 3D shape which the players held in their hands and manipulated (changing the shape and the locations of their bits) before handing it to the other player to do likewise.

I screwed up the last auction of Medici, simply wasn’t paying attention again and drew an extra tile to a set that was already worth nothing to every other player but would also have given me biggest ship plus a max on the wheat track for a +60 bonus (I was already at +5 on wheat). Apparently I let my internal snoring break my absent concentration. Gahh.

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Note: This article was also posted to Boardgamegeek at Wabash Cannonball set piece: #1

I’d promised a while ago to post a move-by-move analysis of one of our Wabash Cannonball games but for various reasons that hasn’t happened and is unlikely to happen. But there is hope. I had an interesting discussion with Adam Kao last night regarding Wabash Cannonball tactics (the game has been popular at Eudemonia). During the discussion we worked through a few set pieces in order to illuminate some of the points I was making. The first set piece is below. If this proves popular/effective I’ll see about posting other set pieces.

Assume a 4 player game of Wabash Cannonball and that the initial share auction resulted in the following share distribution:

• Player #1: PRR $15, B&O $15, Cash $0
• Player #2: Cash $30
• Player #3: C&O $15, Cash $15
• Player #4: NYC $16, Cash $14

Questions:

1. Why did Player #4 spend $16 on the NYC? Is this a good or weak position?
2. Is Player #2 in a strong or weak position? Does Player #2? control initiative?
3. What is each of the four player’s posture as regards game length?
4. What is the first action of each of the four players in the first round of the game? Why?
5. Do they have any other reasonable choices? Why?
6. Might any of the players use a Develop action during the first round? If so, why?

Enjoy.

Last night was the fifth anniversary of SB-Boardgamers. This is also my first attempt at a blog post using my iPhone from end-to-end. It was a fairly typical night at SB-Boardgamers, perhaps a little low on attendance and most people left a bit earlier than usual (morning meetings), but that happens now and again. I took some quick snapshots (see below) to give an idea of the evening.

Eugene Huang gave a short speech about the history of the group and awarded prizes to the people who had played with the most different people (thus fostering the group’s goal of evangelising gaming) and there were pies, cake and cookies to munch. Ted Alspach’s table were surprised that I did not win the award; they thought it was a given for me and not by a small margin. So goes perception bias. It may have been close but Randy Farmer and John Yeager took the prizes instead (a copy of Tadsch Mahal and one of Knizia’s Lord of the Rings games) which seems reasonable (I’ve no interest in either game).

I played 5 player Imperial (won) and two 3 player games of Army of Frogs (won both). Apparently it was my night. Adam Kao (my primary opponent in all of the night’s games) was excellent competition. I had to (surreptitiously) muster and coordinate all three other players against him while also playing tempo hard against him, pushing him to decelerate when he really needed to keep accelerating the game in order to win Imperial. It was an excellent game!

Observations:

• Army of Frogs does not suffer the uncontrollable blocking problem with 3 players as it does with 4.
• My iPhone camera skills need improvement.
• The native camera application on the iPhone is poor. Darkroom does image stabilisation and is much better.
• Lack of cut’n’paste support on the iPhone is a problem.
• Lack of integration between the iPhone’s Wordpress application and the NextGen gallery module I use on this blog is unfortunate. I will probably end up post-processing all iPhone posted entries with pictures to move them over to better gallery product. Bah!
• Lack of easy cite support (partly a function of the lack of cut’n’paste support) for AREFs and the like (mostly for boardgamegeek links) is annoying. It is tempting to write a Wordpress module to extend the markup language for Boardgamegeek links.

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I’m currently fiddling about with integrating my iPhone, various supplemental iPhone features (eg camera), Twitter, Facebook and this blog. There will be some noise and dust. Patience!

New rules for Muck & Brass. There are no substantive changes, just a few minor clarifications for items already raised in the playtest discussion. The changelog:

• Many missing commas fixed
• Few typos fixed
• Clarified bank pools
• Clarified multiple ports in Liverpool and London
• Fixed bad reference
• No more merger shares (finished the job)

This is not an official re-release of the prototype (ie it doesn’t have a new release number). It is just a touch-up of the rules in attempt to say the same things they did before, more clearly. Enjoy.

One of the Muck & Brass playtesters has been unable to post comments using Google Chrome. I don’t know why as I can’t test here with Chrome as I don’t run Windows on any of my machines. I’ve tested with multiple test accounts under Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx and W3: all have been able to post comments without trouble.

Comments are moderated in order to trap spam. When you post a comment, the next page should show the original entry and its comment thread. The last comment in the thread should be the one you just submitted, along with an annotation that it is being held for moderation:

Author: Test User | Date: Saturday 21 February 2009 | Time: 11:20

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

This is a test comment.

If you are having trouble posting comments, please email me directly with the details.

I have posted revision #65 of Muck & Brass¹ to the distribution point and access instructions are about to be sent out². Future releases will bear their own release numbers. Please append commentary, questions, reactions, thoughts etc as comments to each version’s announcement³ post so we may easily track exactly what is being talked about⁴.

The playtest files for Muck & Brass are ready and I’m braced to let them rip on the unsuspecting. Those that have contacted me should expect to be receiving a message with the super-secret (hush now!) instructions on how download the files.

I’d like all textual feedback (session reports, questions, reactions, commentary etc) posted as comments on this blog, I’ll post an entry to the blog with each new release of the game files (hopefully there won’t be many) and y’all can append comments to that for feedback etc. Then as I make a new release, there will be a new post and an associated comment stream etc for that version of the game. I’m hopeful that the only needed changes to the game will be small rules tweaks for clarity and perhaps the odd adjustment of a port or city value¹. Pictures, movies and other media are always welcome and may be sent to me via email or even better, uploaded to my anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.kanga.nu/incoming. Please mention the FTP upload in a posted comment so I’ll know to get the files!

Brace yourself Edna, they’re comin’ ovah!

Another realisation that struck during last night’s 2 player game of Muck & Brass was the value and utility of using the secondary companies as capital sources for primary companies via mergers. For some reason that use hadn’t struck me but as a technique it worked out well in last night’s game. It also clarifies the strange see-saw of incentive and interest that run among clear plurality holdings, ports, mergers, capitalisation and turn order control. The end-game is rife with cases of money-losing investments being the levers necessary for even more profitable returns. The classic example from last night was a share of the LB&SCR which was purchased for $61 and rewarded a lifetime revenue of around $16, but enabled other activities and incentives with the L&SR that generated ~$200 in dividends.

It is a strange thing to discover one’s own game.

Work and local testing is continuing apace. I’ve gotten in several games with the new rules (and scores of simulated games) and so far it is all looking good. The big surprise was today’s two player game which worked far better than I expected.

I shouldn’t be so surprised. Muck and Brass, unlike Wabash Cannonball / Pampas Railroads etc is not primarily an auction game, but is much more about positional and timing advantages than auction values. As such with only two players the auction becomes a linear extension of that two player tactical battle and really works quite well. Of course eventually one player will tend to run away and be simply uncatchable, but that’s to be expected in any two player zero-sum perfect and certain information game, and this should be recognised when it occurs and the game conceded at that point. Don’t be too quick to pull the trigger though: there’s an awful lot of ground that can be recovered with careful exploitation of the default turn order. Still, it is a pleasant surprise and I’ve added two player support to the map and rules (a small change in all).

The last change, and this is a small one, is that I added another port to Liverpool and London with costs around $100. The current distribution of ports and their costs is a mix of guesswork and inspiration. So far it has mostly seemed about right in our games. I’ve added the very expensive ports for Liverpool and London simply to allow trimming back late game behemoths with egregiously expensive (and historically accurate) ports, thus providing a dramatic and welcome turning point in the late game.