The new tags feature on the Geek is great and well overdue. Folksonomies seem the most natural way to order and categorise information collaboratively. There is a good MP3 about it at IT Conversations.

I went through the Spiel des Jahres site and tagged all the nominees and recommended games – which was pretty boring. Apparently in the earlier years there was a category for the most beautiful game – most do not compare well to your average Days of Wonder game.

I was surprised at how much influence the award has had since 1979. A large proportion of the older games we still discuss have been recommended. Bruno Faidutti’s Ideal Games Library is almost a showcase for the recommended games. I wonder how much of an influence the award has had on our groupthink?

Last night, four of us played Stockmarket, a 1987 game I picked up from a BoardGameGeek math trade. I was expecting something like Buy Low Sell High or Executive Decision, games about supply and demand, but instead Stockmarket is more about double guessing.

The rules are simple. Players can invest in six different companies. Every round each player gets 10 cards with stock price movements, for instance “Legal & General -50p” or “Nat West +£2” and money to invest in shares. In each round there are three phases where players can either buy or sell one company’s shares. At the end of the round all cards from all players are pooled and added together, so that each company’s share price fluctuates. These prices fluctuations mean that player’s stock becomes more or less valuable. When buying stock, players only know the price changes in their hand of cards and the stocks that other players are investing in, so they have to follow market trends, just like in real life. There are a few other rules, like cards allowing you to stop a price movement in a single stock, rights issues, currency fluctuations and directorships, but the game is won and lost with the stock movement cards.

The psychology of the stockmarket’s herd mentality is interesting, it’s fun to be a 1980’s yuppie, but there is a lot of slow, fiddly arithmetic, the decisions are fairly obvious and there is a lot of luck. Executive Decision and Buy Low Sell High are slightly better options.

5/10

We finished with a 3-player whirl through San Juan. I still think it is a classic.

One of my favourite sites is Rick Heli’s Spotlight On Games. He hand-made his site well before easy content management systems like WordPress came along, so he has no RSS feed. After several false starts I seem to have finally found one that works: Ponyfish.

The feeds are just for the 1001 Nights of Games and Random Musings sections, but you could use Ponyfish to make others.

• 1001 Nights of Gaming – http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/466gJUQbujd
• 1001 Military Nights of Gaming – http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/931vcbxkFFS
• Spotlight on Games: Random Musings – http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/933OWVqemGI

So far they work fine.

Last night four of us played the Transportsiedler scenario from the Settlers Book.

It is basically Seafarers of Catan but instead of ships representing sea routes, they represent individual ships carrying goods from Catan to two smaller islands laden with ore and gold. This always seemed to me like a obviously good idea for a scenario. You generate goods on your islands separately, so you have to ship to the new islands to build there. Also, ship transport is risky, because there is a fast marauding pirate.

Despite the great premise, it was not a great experience. Unfortunately the PDF rules do not include Rick Heli’s, note on the original translation:

Additional Note: Since the Robber Baron is not in this scenario, and since there is no “hand” of cards per se, I wondered whether it is still true that a roll of “7” causes a player to lose half his cards should he hold 8 or more. I wrote to and received a reply from Stefan Otte of Kosmos Verlag. The German text of it is below, but the gist is that if a player has more than seven cards at all of his locations, he must indeed still discard as usual. However, he goes on to say that their recommendation is to try omitting this rule as otherwise this scenario is sometimes very difficult to play. He finishes by suggesting that one play with whichever variant seems best to the players. So apparently it’s impossible to go wrong on the issue.

From my reading of the PDF, we played with no discarding, so we had huge handfuls of cards. As getting across the sea to the new islands is dangerous, he winner was just the guy who had the 3:1 port and who shipped the least.

There are two other rules problems:

1. The turn phase order in the summary is different to the ordering of the rules. Which is correct?
2. Are warehouses built in the normal build phase? If so, ships are doubly exposed to the pirate, making the process even more tortuous. After some confusion we decided to allow warehouse building after the ship move phase.

Mik Svellov (where is he these days?) also had reservations about how well the scenario works for three.

Transport-Siedler works with 4 players only. In the 3-player game one player is able to move his goods unchallenged while the other two players compete against each other.

Stay away. I have dropped my ranking of the Settlers’ Book a notch. 7/10.

Last night I went over to Chris’s house to play Up Front. Chris has written a nice session report.

A while ago, I tried to read the rules to Up Front, without any of the components to hand, so I could PBEM. I gave up in disgust after about ten minutes, so it is amazing that the gameplay was so simple and fluid in comparison. Basically, the game system is very elegant, but it is surrounded by a lot of fiddly detail. You can see it is a product of the 1980’s. This detail gives a really authentic feel to the game, so I am torn about condemning it out of hand. It is just a pity the cards are so covered with obscure glyphs and acronyms.

The latest Point2Point podcast mentioned that Multiman Publishing will reprint Up Front in the autumn. It will be interesting to see which way they go with it. They could either streamline it a little or slavishly reproduce the original with no alterations. I hope they do the former, but I doubt it. It would be risky to disappoint the faithful. I suppose the best solution might be to have a simplified “UF:Starter Kit” version as the base game, but include all the original chrome for those who want it.

It is definitely a good game. I played Blue Moon with Chris when I first met him and enjoyed it very much, but if you asked me how to play it now I would have no idea. On the other hand, I could probably teach a bastardised version of Up Front in six months time, so it is clearly more intuitive. I would certainly rather play Up Front than Blue Moon, which is high praise. Buying it at current eBay prices is another question.

8/10