The cookbook of Catan. (Seriously.)

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen.   Check out this article about "Wood For Sheep:  The Unauthorized Settlers Cookbook" which is filled with tons of Catan inspired recipes.   

I wonder if there's a recipe for 'Teuber Tubers'......  

Deconstructed hexagonal salad nicoise

Honestly, I'm not really one to judge.  I've been wearing my Settlers socks for months now.

(Thanks for the tip, Momo...)

Today in awesome....

I stopped playing Settlers years and years ago.  But these socks at one my favourite online retailers are so awesome I just had to order a pair.

FanExpo 2013....

Oh, the humanity!!!!!

For probably the 5th year in a row, I attended FanExpo this August at the enormous Toronto Metro Convention Centre.  In case you don't know, FanExpo is Canada's largest fan convention for comic book fanatics, trekkies, gamers, writers, sports fanatics (this year!), and almost every other nerd grouping you can think of.  And this year, it seems to have been the biggest one yet.  My partner is an artist and he sells his creepy, beautiful poster prints like hotcakes at these shows.  So for a couple of days of hard work at our booth I get a full exhibitor pass for the whole weekend and I get to skip all the lines!  This year was our best year yet as the show keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Vincent's booth this year

I was even able to take the Saturday off from selling to attend the Great Canadian Board Game Blitz which is always hectic fun.  If you haven't heard of it before (like, say in my previous posts), it's a very friendly competition where everyone plays a bunch of games and gets a score according to their ranking in each game.  At the end of the day there are prizes for highest scores as well as some random draws, too.  What's really nice is that after the first couple of rounds the players with the lowest scores get to pick which games they play first which is kind of a natural catch-up mechanism in the greater meta-game being played over the day.

First time playing San Juan at the Blitz, GREAT little game!

I played lots of great games that day including the heavy (Goa) and the light (Tsuro).  I was quite excited to play and also win one particular game, Trains & Stations, by Eric M. Lang of Quarriors fame.  Eric, who has a great first name and also resides in Southern Ontario, was kind enough to explain to us how to play the game.  T&S is mainly a dice game but there is a lot more going on than just that.  There is route and station-building, set-collection, tickets to complete straight outta Ticket To Ride, and even a bit of a stock market element.  It's quite a dense little game considering how quickly it plays and how light the dice make it feel.

Trains & Stations board with dice (trains) played and resource cards

In general, players are rolling their dice to try and get train symbols to place on the board or to build stations.  When rolled as train symbols, the dice themselves are placed on the board to try and build routes between cities.  These routes can be left unfinished and other players can add their own dice to finish them, yielding points to all players involved.  An interesting strategy, of course, is to piggy back on as many routes as possible to score on each completion.  Stations attached to completed routes generate resource cards for their owners and there are bonuses at game end for the player with the most in each resource.  In a very "Acquire"-y twist, once a resource runs out a better resource replaces it and players have the option to trade-up 2 for 1 for the newer more valuable resource.

"All the pretty dices......."

All this is quite fascinating and an interesting mix of mechanics that I REALLY like.  But it's a very short game - 30-45 minutes - and the dice and cards inject a hefty dose of luck.  On the last round of turns, the player before me completely crapped out on her roll and was unable to do anything and then on my turn I managed to roll well enough to complete some excellent routes which let me draw more cards.  These cards just happened to give me the majority in a couple of resources allowing me to secure the win.  So I'm not entirely sure what I think of the game yet - it's lots of fun with many strategies for play, but the ruleset is a bit long for such a short game and the swings of luck seemed to often dictate the strategy you take.  Still, I really want to play this again and that's a good sign.

Completed route tickets

Overall, it was an awesome day packing 6 games into 7 hours and meeting lots of new people.  And I was lucky enough to win a random draw and snatch a copy of Tsuro which I had already been considering buying after playing it that day.  Thanks again to the online game store Fun Games Cafe out of Mississauga for providing some of the prizes, including the one I took home.

My teenage years encapsulated in a picture....

A friend just posted a pic of my old homemade Settlers edition on Facebook which she has held onto for 10+ years.  Back in '96 in northern BC, it was very hard for a 15-year-old to get a copy of Settlers of Catan without a credit card and before the current board game fanaticism brought everything to North America.  So I made my own copy with the rulesets I found online.  I think this picture foreshadows a lot. It's also a tad tragic - barns in farmland???  HA!

Double-click to embiggen the gloriousness

(Thanks, Shannon, for holding on to this piece of history!)

Epic Settlers of Catan boards...

Found on the Settlers Facebook page  - 8- and 9-player Settlers games.  Epic.

(Although I feel like expansion and trading would be remarkably easy and a bit dull....)

First Play: Through The Ages...

Played my first game of TTA a few nights ago and including the rules explanation it took us about 5 hours.  Yes, that's right.  For a 2-player game.  I knew this going in, however, and had read a 37-page quick start guide beforehand (I know, I'm really selling the game, eh?)

The daunting score tracks

And I haven't yet decided what I think.  I knew it would be epic so I had set aside an entire evening.  However, I had read that this was one of the greatest civilization building games ever.  Um, no.  It is in fact an utterly soulless Euro game of action point allowance, card selection, and resource management.  Sure there are leaders and wars and armies and...   blah, blah, blah.  This is about as dry an exercise as they come.  The awful artwork on the cards serve only to add a splash colour to a very tight game of cube-pushing, tableau-building, and accounting, accounting, accounting.

My third wonder

But I enjoyed it.  While it was my turn, that is.  When it was not my turn, I made dinner, did dishes, and folded laundry.  Seriously.  Never will I ever play this with 3 people.  Oh man.  And I wonder truly whether there are other games that do this just as good but in a much shorter timespan.  Resource management: Agricola.  Action points: Tikal.  Tableau-building: Saint Petersburg.  Simple, card-based battle: Tempus.  Excessive amounts of accounting: Black Friday. The big question is whether I should play one game with all these aspects combined when I can play all the shorter games in the same amount of time.  Well, I definitely want to play the game again and find out.  I guess that says something.

My tableau near the end of the game.  Tie game!

A particularly mathy way to determine first player....

At games night at UW, the mathematician friends of mine have a particularly quick and clever way to determine who starts each game which they call "Shoots" (don't ask me why...) Anyone who has done any studies with modular arithmetic or group theory should be quite comfortable with it.

Okay, so here's how it goes: one player calls "Shoots!" and on three, everyone reveals a random number of fingers, rock-papers-scissors style. Now add up all the fingers and count that many around the circle of players clockwise starting with the player who called for "Shoots". Ta-da. Whoever you finish with is the start player.

Of course, in math terms, if x is the total number of fingers and the players are numbered clockwise as 1,...,n where 1 is the caller of "Shoots" then the start player is simply x modulo n. See, easy!

Or I suppose you could just grab Ted Alspach's cute Start Player deck of cards. But I think math is WWWAAAAYYYYY more fun.....

Daily dose of awesomeness....

Big Bang Theory catches on to the age-old "Wood For Sheep" joke from Settlers.... Only for the highly immature and severely dorky.  Um.  Like me.



(Link thanks to the other Eric at BGGNews...)

Nature versus Nerd-ture....

So Vince and I just spent two days visiting friends in Toronto and taking in all the mayhem that is Toronto Gay Pride.  In fact, Toronto's Pride is the third largest festival of its type in North America.  And yet through it all, the only thing I could think of was getting to 401 Games on Yonge Street to pick up some of the games I'd passed up at Origins.

Let the rest of them have their parade - I think I'll stick with my shiny new copies of Rails of New England and Barons....