inconsequential ruminations

I love Zero Punctuation – even if I don’t play video games any more.

I am a fickle gamer – a jack of all trades and master of none. Sometimes I get enthusiastic about wargames, sometimes Eurogames and now abstracts. The last time this happened it was Go and Twixt. Now it is Hex.

For those of you that don’t know, the rules of Hex are incredibly simple. On a grid of hexes, lay down pieces one after the other until one of you has connected a line between two opposing sides. It makes Chess and Go look complicated. Of course it does not have the depth of those games, but it is deep enough for me. (I read Wikipedia fairly carefully, but I still can’t work out what PSPACE-complete means.)

I gave up on Chess at the age of 11 because I got fed up of Steven Hawkings lookalikes humiliating me. I gave up on Go in 2004 because I got headaches playing online. Hex on the other hand is a gentler game and a solid competitive 10×10 game can be finished in six minutes at Kurnik – which is the best place to go for real-time Hex.

John Farrell’s Facebook Hex application started me off. He has documented his experience of coding it and he did a really good job. Unfortunately, there are only a few people available to play against.

There are some other good ways to play Hex over the web. The most popular is Little Golem, but my favourite so far is Richard’s PBEM Server (Gamerz.net). I have known about Gamerz.net for years, but I didn’t realise that there is a play-by-web interface with 79 different games available to play. The site is very plain and easy to use and the fact that you can seamlessly switch to play by email is slick. The most popular game is backgammon, and some really strange variants of it, most of which seem come from one interesting looking book, but there are lots of games available. Feel free to challenge me – my username is icheyne. I have been playing David Bush (twixter at the Geek), an expert Hex and Twixt player, and he has recommended me some more games: Akron, Amazons, Batalo, Druid,  Havannah, Hexade, Octi, Punct, Renju, Shogi, Unlur, and Yinsh. Hopefully I will be able to tell you what I think of them. So far we have played Y, a Hex variant connecting three edges of a triangular board, and Crossway, which is a connection game cunningly adapted to a Go board.

As you can tell from my record against David, I am far from an expert abstract gamer, but I am getting more competent. There are some excellent Hex computer AIs available, although they are still weaker than the strongest humans. Hexy is good on Windows – but if you play more than 20 games you have to register via email which took several days to get an answer. Overall I prefer Six, on my Linux home PC, although there is a new Windows port. I have even managed to beat it at beginner level – which is a first for me as I could never beat Chess AIs on any setting. It is a good way to improve quickly.

Mikko asked for a blog recommendations. Here are a few random ones:

• Mike Siggin’s Gamer’s Notebook
• Beyond Swelter’s Kitchen
• 1001 Nights of Gaming – link to feed
• Headless Hollow
• Green Dobbers
  

After around two years of no gaming, mainly due to excessive parental stress, Vanessa has started to play games with me again.

We started on Lost Cities, which was even better than I remembered. I cannot see anyone supplanting Reiner Knizia as my favourite designer.

We also played Carcassonne the Castle, another Knizia game, and it is very nice. It is my favourite Carcassonne so far, even better than Carcassonne the Discovery. Shannon Appelcline’s RPGnet review is excellent – if you skip the rules regurgitation and go straight to the Relationships to Other Games section. He summarises the differences between the basic game and the Castle better than I could.

I really want to try out Carcassonne the City at some point, which is apparently quite similar, but supports more players.

This brought back a few childhood memories.

Three of us played Agricola for the first time last night. Chris bought an expensive, but really nicely made, set of paste-ups from Andy Merritt. I hope that Z-Man sell the cards separately, so he does not have to buy another set.

Agricola is as good as advertised. I see no reason to play Caylus again. I have been thinking about it ever since.

This is the fourth Uwe Rosenburg game I have played (Bohnanza, Babel, Schnäppchen Jagd) and the only one I have liked. I did not think he had it in him.

The rules are simple enough, but understanding how to play well is tough. Luckily Chris had played the solitaire Flash version and several two player games, so he was able to stop us getting frustrated.

As others have said, the best thing about Agricola is that it manages to be both an intricate “system game”, while being very thematic. Frank Branham’s comments about the game are spot on as usual, although I totally disagree with his comments about the Geek.

Some have criticised it for being multiplayer solitaire, which is a valid point, but the competition for actions stops that being a problem for me. Also, Chris Farrell makes the criticism that this is a fixed-fun game, so better with fewer players, but this just makes me think I should buy it so I can play it with Vanessa.

If you want some more (better written) comments and a nice summary of the mechanics, check out the Spotlightongames review.

9/10 for now.

You have probably all seen this, but I am impressed with this list of 103 Age of Steam, Power Grid and Ticket to Ride expansion maps. I hope it is kept maintained.