New to Me: Winter 2020 — Life on an Island

So on January 1st, I moved to an island: Kauai, the least populated of the four major Hawaiian islands. It’s got a population of just over 70,000 according to the last count, which makes it a fair amount smaller than the city of Berkeley where I used to live — let alone the whole California Bay Area. So the question was always how hard or easy would it be to find gaming. Fortunately, a nice little game store called 8 Moves Ahead appeared on the island a bit more than a year ago, and even more fortunately they’re heavily focused on play.

But the downside so far has been that that play has mostly been more American games, with Magic: The Gathering taking up most of the oxygen in the store from what I can tell. I’ve had some good sports willing to play my euros, and there are some limited euros available in the store, but as of this moment I don’t feel like I have a strong euro-interested game group. Room to grow, I suppose.

In the meantime, this first New to Me for the year is more Americanized than usual, and also obviously a lot shorter. I only made it to either three or four sessions at the store. That’s because in January I was coming up to speed on my new life here (including learning how to drive again after a multi-decade hiatus) and then in March, COVID struck hard.

But here’s what’s New to Me, and what I think about it, as a somewhat less American game player, more focused on medium-weight euros.

The Great (“I Would Buy This”)

On the Underground: London (2019). On the Underground has long been one of my favorites, as I love its very tactical play: how you can play tracks to grab instantaneous bonuses, and how you’re always reacting to what the passenger might want to do. I also think the way that you can build together multiple lines is quite clever. So, when I saw this new edition “London / Berlin”, I was very interested in getting it, mostly because it had a new map of Berlin.

As it happens I haven’t actually played the new map yet, but I did play the old London map in the new edition, and I thought it was a perfectly good new edition. The graphic design itself I thought was a wash. The new edition by LudiCreations is one of these “artsy” designs, and though the artwork is definitely more attractive, it was also harder to see the lines in the places along the center where there are 3-5 different spaces available. However, where the new edition really improved on the original is the fact the map is now laid out on a large-scale grid, and so you can see where stations are based on a letter and number (e.g., C-4). That’s probably going to be helpful to any non-Londoner.

And I’m looking forward to trying out Berlin. Someday, when I can go to a game store again. Continue reading

Support Mechanics & Meeples in 2018

Over the years, my board game writing has very much been a labor of love. So, once a year I like to remind readers that they can help to support this writing, and ensure that Mechanics & Meeples continues into the distant future.

If you’re interested in supporting the publication of Mechanics & Meeples articles, I encourage you to become a patron at Patreon. You can choose to contribute as little as $1 per new article I write (or even $1 per month), and in doing so you’ll work together with (hopefully) lots of other patrons to support this site.

Here’s the URL:

http://www.patreon.com/user?u=67916

When you become a Patreon, you can also receive all of the notes I post on Patreon, where I do my best to post a link for every board game review I publish and for every old article that I revive here. So, it’s a one-stop shop for all of my board game writing (though only the new stuff is labeled as “paid” creations).

Even if you personally can’t become a patron, thanks for your readership and your thoughtful comments. That’s just as important as a little bit of patronage to keep me writing!

Wiz-War Expansion Cards

This week I’m going to do something I haven’t done before. I’m publishing an expansion for an existing game, Tom Jolly’s Wiz-War.

As I’ve written elsewhere Wiz-War was a much beloved game of my ‘tweens. I suspect it was the most played board game for my group throughout the later ’90s. As we played it more and more we also developed a rule: we added one new card every time we played a game. This was made possible thanks to Chessex putting out blank card packs.

So I offer you up all the bonus cards from my set, with no (or rather, few) comments on whether they’re good or bad. I’ll also offer the caveat that if you’re going to add cards, you should put in more numbers too, to keep things balanced. Just follow the normal distribution from the base game. We also put in duplicates of some of the more common spells (which I hopefully didn’t copy any of below). Continue reading

The Gone Gaming Anniversary Tour

The Anniversary Tour in BerkeleyAs I wrote in “About Mechanics & Meeples” — the introduction to this blog — these articles ran for two and a half years at “Gone Gaming”, a group blog that I initially shared with seven other talented board game writers (and many more than that over time).

August of 2006 marked the first anniversary of the blog, and so we decided to engage in a bit of silliness. We imagined an “Anniversary Tour”, where we’d all visit the home towns of all the members of the blog. Each of us wrote a blog set in our home town. To go with them, I photoshopped together a bunch of photographs that people had given me to make it look (to an intentionally fake degree) that we’d actually visited these locales.

It was fun and it helped us to not only spotlight the members of the group blog, but also our impressions of those other members.

My contribution ran on August 3, and it wouldn’t make any sense without the context of the original blog, so I’ve opted not to reprint it here. However, I invite you to go read about the entire Anniversary Trip. If you like some of other bloggers featured there, I also encourage you to read the rest of the Gone Gaming group blog, which has lots more articles than just mine. —SA, 8/9/12