The Thinking Gamer

Thinking Gamer Video Game Decade in Review

Randy Buehler — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:22:32 GMT

Keep in mind my perspective as you read this. These are not (necessarily) the best video games of each year, but rather the best *thinking games* for digital platforms. (I'll throw in my opinion about the most important / influential / best video games from time to time, but they'll be limited to honorable mentions.)

     2000 - The Sims

I'm never quite sure how to categorize The Sims. It's always labeled as a "strategy game" in video game market research reports, but it doesn't really have winners or losers. I've always counted Dungeons & Dragons as a thinking game, so I think I'm supposed to count The Sims too. Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that this was an incredibly well executed and wildly popular game.

Honorable mentions: Diablo II, Counter-Strike.

What an amazing year. Diablo II is still the best action RPG of all-time, and was my own guilty pleasure game for many years. And Counter-Strike (which is technically a user-generated mod of Half-Life) showed people how poplar an online multi-player shooter could be (a genre that still dominates the industry to this day).

     2001 - Party Poker

I could just as easily have given the nod to Poker Stars, which was a bit better polished at the time and is bigger today (plus Paradise Poker pre-dates both of them), but it was really Party Poker and it's aggressive marketing that launched the online poker boom. No one in the video game industry seems to talk much about online poker, but I'm not sure why not. They're games for digital platforms that make tons and tons of money, right? They also fundamentally changed the landscape when it comes to thinking games and thinking gamers. Suddenly it was possible to directly apply your gamer skills to making money.

The Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour was a nice dream, but the truth was that only a couple dozen guys could make enough money to live on and nobody was getting rich. Kai might have had a $100,000 year once, but the typical good years were in the $50,000 range with $20,000 very much in play. Don't get me wrong, that's a hell of a lot better than flipping burgers (even before you count the fun of traveling the world and hanging out with cool people) and it's a lot of money when you're college-aged; but it's not really a career. Most of the really great players eventually find something more lucrative to spend our time on. Meanwhile it's really tough to stay on top of the game unless you're devoting all of your time to it, so the Pro Tour winds up with a steady stream of hungry 20-somethings rising up and dominating for a couple of years before they grow up and move on.

Anyway, the poker boom provided a way to pursue the whole "gaming is way more fun than getting a real job" thing while having significantly more earning potential. The World Poker Tour launched in 2002 and things really heated up when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003. Not only did he provide an "anybody can win" story that the media adored, but he also won his entry fee in a PokerStars satellite tournament, thus attracting a lot of "dead money" to online poker as his "turned $39 into $2.5 million" story was told over and over again.

A funny thing happened to the Pro Tour with lots of its players turning to poker. Very few of them stopped playing Magic. Magic became the game that they play for fun after grinding out a living playing poker. Just because there aren't as many opportunities to win money playing Magic as there are in poker, doesn't mean it's not the more fun game. Dave Williams is probably the most visible example of this -- he's been a very visible poker celebrity ever since finishing 2nd in the WSOP in 2004, but he's also continued playing Magic the whole time ranging from late-night drafts in Vegas with other Magic/poker cross-overs to a steady string of money finishes on the Pro Tour to tweeting while in Europe about the crappy WiFi that won't allow him to play Magic Online. My favorite Magic/poker cross-over story, however, is Gabriel Nassif. Nassif has managed to stay one of the best couple of players on Magic's Pro Tour for the entire decade while also making the transition from "omg this is a lot of money for a 16-year old" to "my poker ev is better, but I still love Magic."

There were some other decent thinking games in 2001 -- Kohan was an intriguing take on how to do a real-time strategy game that didn't require great twitch skills, and Advance Wars really moved the tactics genre forward -- but from my seat 2001 was the year that online poker changed everything.

2002 - Magic Online

Magic players used to stop playing once it became inconvenient to find opponents to play against. Around the time they graduated college, or got married, or had their first kid it became hard to make time to head down to the friendly local game store and Magic became a victim of these lifestyle changes. Ever since Magic Online came out, however, that just doesn't happen any more. Now there's always a new draft about to fire and the 10pm draft after your kid goes to sleep can be followed by the midnight "bad idea" draft. The product definitely has its flaws and it's not hard to imagine ways it could be a lot better, but if you compare life as a Magic player nowadays to life as a Magic player before 2002, things are just more awesome because Magic Online exists.

This isn't a Magic decade in review, however, so I want to talk about Magic Online in the context of other video games. I'm pretty sure it's the #2 turn-based strategy franchise of all time. Civilization has made more money, but I don't think anything else has. I'm still bound by an NDA that prevents me from discussing the details, but it's not hard to triangulate off of publicly available numbers and project a lifetime revenue above $100 million. That's not in the same league as Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, but it's still quite a respectable number, especially for a PC-only title. I wonder sometimes whether the mainstream video game world realizes how much money Magic Online has actually made.

In addition to proving that a turn-based strategy game can make real money, MTGO also proved that the digital object sales model can work. This may not sound like such a big deal nowadays with everybody's facebook wall littered with posts from social games that make their money that way, but back in 2002 it was still very much an open question. Many folks gathered at industry conferences and discussed the reasons why the so-called "Korean model" couldn't work in the States. Well it did work. Magic Online obviously had all the advantages of its relationship with Magic (built-in / captive audience, known great game-play, etc.), and it's never done a particularly good job recruiting new players into Magic (every MTGO player, to a first approximation, starts out as a paper Magic player), but within the context of Thinking Gamer awards there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone who likes strategy games will try Magic at some point and most will love it.

     2003 - Galactic Civilizations

Kind of a weak year. I almost gave the nod to Madden '04 because they re-did the engine behind their franchise mode, which is essentially a stand-alone football simulation game with a fair amount of depth and re-playability. (Madden itself is the kind of game that used to make me jealous of people with high dexterity scores, but as I've grown to embrace who I am as a gamer I go straight to the franchise mode, sim all the games, and play what amounts to a gigantic, well-flavored spreadsheet game.) Meanwhile, the most innovative game released in 2003 was almost certainly Defense of the Ancients (DotA) - the mod of Warcraft III that has become so wildly popular that multiple AAA-sized projects are now coming out which attempt to recapture that gameplay within a "real" game. DotA is too much of a dexterity game to get the nod from me, though, so I'm calling out a solid new franchise developed by Stardock. Stardock has also turned into a nice home for various strategy games and genres that the big publishers don't seem to care about and their Impulse digital distribution system has much of the same functionality as Valve's much more heralded Steam.

     2004 - Oasis

Like some of my board game choices, this one may be biased by the fact that I currently work for Mind Control Software. That said, I was not around when they developed this game and it did win several indie game of the year type awards. It's essentially a civilization-style experience boiled down into about 5-10 minutes of turn-based strategy goodness.

Honorable mention: Others seem to like the Total War series more than me, but from what I can tell 2004's Rome: Total War was the best of the series. Oh by the way, this was also the year Blizzard unleashed World of Warcraft on an unsuspecting world.

     2005 - Civilization IV

A really nice step forward for this venerable franchise. Civ III (which came out in 2001) was quite bloated, with an accumulation of new mechanics and new ideas really weighing down the game. With Civ IV they finally started cutting stuff away, eliminating the extraneous baggage so that the underlying awesome gameplay could shine through. I had thought that Civ II (which I spent many an all-nighter playing while in college in the early 90's) might have been the peak, but Civ IV was genuinely better. I also enjoyed Civ IV: Colonization, which uses the Civ IV engine to play out a New World scenario where you work for one of the European powers as they seek to colonize America and you win by seceding and then winning the revolutionary war. It's less open-ended, but the base game can sometimes take 10-20 hours to play so it's nice to have a more compact experience.

Honorable mention: Guitar Hero launched rhythm games as a mainstream phenomena and the first truly new genre added to the video game landscape in about a decade.

     2006 - Galactic Civilizations II, I guess

Hopefully somebody will post a comment with a better suggestion as I don't think Gal Civ is worthy of winning two different years, but turn-based strategy remains a niche in the video game world and there have been some dry years ...

Honorable mention: Wii Sports. The innovations continue over on the more mainstream side of the industry with the launch of the Wii and the introduction of motion controls to console gaming.

     2007 - Desktop Tower Defense

I know this wasn't the first tower defense game, but it was the first one that hooked me. It also gets credit from me for bringing Kongregate to my attention as a website full of free games worthy of checking out semi-regularly. I will always remember the first time I played it when I had the flash of insight "OH! I build a MAZE!" and to this day I don't particularly care for the fixed-path tower defense games. The challenge of figuring out how to build the maze is the best part of the genre, in my opinion, and DTD is well balanced, well executed, and damn close to the platonic ideal of this genre.

Honorable mention: Speaking of new platforms that make significant amounts of new content available, Xbox Live Arcade started coming into its own in 2007, with digital versions of a couple of tabletop classics (Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne) among the highlights.

     2008 - Braid

Playing Braid remains one of the most jaw-droppingly, mind-blowingly awesome experiences I have ever had with a video game. The time-manipulation mechanics are brilliant and the level-design is incredibly clever. Multiple times I would find myself just staring at the screen thinking, shaking my head in amazement, and knowing that the answer was there if only I was smart enough to find it. It is crystal clear to me that this was a labor of love for Jonathan Blow and the extra years he spent tightening and polishing it really show.

2nd place: Civilization Revolution. Civ Rev is by far the best game in the almost 20-year history of this franchise and it would have won most of the years in this decade. It's essentially a slimmed down version of Civ IV designed specifically for console and handheld gaming, but that's "slimmed down" in the sense of "I am so much healthier now that I've lost 100 pounds." The challenge of porting the core experience onto devices that don't have mouse/keyboard really inspired the designers and developers to ask themselves what actually mattered and the resulting game has all the strategic depth and strategic fun of a 20-hour long Civilization session boiled down into a game that can be finished in just 2-4 hours. It's the only game on Xbox where I have fully 1000 gamerscore.

Honorable mention: If you play (tabletop) Dunegons & Dragons, you really should check out D&D Insider. The Character Builder is exactly the tool you've always been hoping for (with every rule from every book and every issue of Dungeon and Dragon magazine coded into it) and that plus the Compendium make prep time a pleasure instead of a chore. I can no longer imagine building a character any other way.

     2009 - Drop7

If you're a thinking gamer and you have an iPhone then one of two things is happening right now. Either you're smiling and nodding knowingly or you're going to trust me and go straight to the app store and buy this game. It's a fairly simple game ("Tetris meets Sudoku" is the best description of it that I've heard), and the presentation is pretty sparse, but the strategy involved is remarkably deep. Hardcore mode is the best way to play as things get interesting right away and there's just the right amount of randomness so that it's replayable, and you can catch a lucky break, but you are also convinced that skillful play is what really matters. My only tiny complaint is that I really wish they would track a running average of your last 20 games. It tracks high scores and average score (and if you put in your facebook info then it will let you compare high scores with friends), but with 500+ games under my belt it's hard to move either of those numbers now.

Other 2009 finalists: Fieldrunners is a nice "build your own maze" tower defense game for iPhone. Duels of the Planeswalkers is a really nice way to play Magic against an AI, especially if you're still learning (or re-learning) the game. (It's currently only on Xbox Live Arcade, but is supposed to come out for PC and PSN in 2010). Plants versus Zombies is a bit too easy for my tastes, but it's turn-based strategy done with all the quality and polish that you can count on from PopCap.

Honorable mention: I also quite enjoyed Dragon Age, and definitely recommend it if you're looking for a single-player RPG experience.

     Decade in summary

My top 5 are Magic Online, PokerStars, Braid, Drop7, and Civilization Revolution. They're so diverse that I'm not sure I know how to rank them relative to one another. Online poker has had by far the most financial success of these five, and has changed the lives of many thinking gamers by providing them with a source of income. However, at the end of the day poker isn't as much fun as the other games on this list so it can't win. Braid is probably too small to be game of the decade. It's an awesome experience, but once you've solved it, you've solved it and you probably aren't going back to re-play it. Drop7 seems like it might be a bit too small (and a bit too unpolished) to win as well. Civ Rev didn't win it's year, but I do find it interesting that I'm still playing Civ Rev a year later whereas I'm not playing Braid any more -- it does have the virtue of being quite re-playable. I even downloaded Civ Rev for my iPhone so I could work my way through some of the scenarios that I hadn't gotten to (something I don't recommend unless you already know how to play Civ because the interface is about two notches worse on an iPhone).

All of which leaves me with Magic Online. I'd feel better if it was a better polished product, or a product that I could recommend with a clean conscience to folks that don't already know how to play Magic, but even with those flaws it's still an awesome addition to the life of any Magic player. And Magic is the best thinking game of all time.

     Looking forward

Well that's my take on the decade in video games. Things were a little dry for us thinking gamers in the middle of the last decade (and the early years were saved only by MTGO and poker), but now there are a bunch of new digital distribution platforms available where publishers and/or game designers can profitably target a niche audience like us. Of the 10 games I called out from 2007 - 2009, only one of them (Civ Rev) can be purchased at a brick and mortar store. Things are looking up and I'm excited to see what the 20-10's have to bring!

Board Game Decade in Review

Randy Buehler — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:49:00 GMT

Here's my take on the best board games of the last decade, broken down year by year:

     2000 - Carcasonne
A really good game, and a truly innovative design space to explore as well. It's no longer in regular rotation for me, but Santa brought "The Kids of Carcasonne" for Kira this year and I highly recommend that variant for anyone with a budding gamer who's 4-7 years old. It's easy to learn and no reading is required, but it's got a surprising amount of depth of strategy -- enough to keep things interesting for parents too.

     2001 - Transamerica over Risk 2210, I guess
Nothing I saw when searching through Board Game Geek by publishing year really seems to have stood the test of time. I've heard that Risk 2210 is quite a good variant, but I've never actually played it myself and it's a Wizards of the Coast design so my info could easily be biased. Meanwhile, Transamerica is fun enough that we still bust it out every once in a while at the ongoing WotC R&D board game night.

   2002 - Puerto Rico
This was ranked #1 for many years on Board Game Geek and with good reason. The action-drafting mechanic is really clever and the strategies in the game are quite deep. It's been recently edged on Board Game Geek by a game that does the action drafting mechanic a bit better in my opinion (Agricola) but you've got to give Puerto Rico credit not only for being the best board game of 2002, but also blazing a trail for future game designers to follow.

     2003 - Amun Re
A bit less heralded than many of the others on this list (it's only #57 on the 'Geek), but I for one really enjoy this game and our circle of gamers considers it the go-to game when we have 5 people who want to play. I think it only truly shines with 5 players, but if you've got 5 then it might just be the best game of the decade.

   2004 - St. Petersburg (over Ticket to Ride)
I have played a ton of Ticket to Ride (esp in various digital incarnations), and it was a fine choice for Spiel des Jahres in 2004, but when given the choice I choose to play St. Petersburg just about every time. A few of the cards from the original game were overpowered or underpowered and so we now use the versions of the Mistress, Observatory, and Academy that came with the 2008 expansion; but we don't use any of the other stuff from the expansion. With those few "development" tweaks the base game remains a remarkably deep, re-playable game that clocks in a good bit under an hour even at 4 players.

     2005 - Vegas Showdown (over Railroad Tycoon)
This could be the a Wizards of the Coast bias, but I think Vegas Showdown was quite a good game. It's the only one of the WotC-design Avalon Hill games that I actually like, so I can't be completely biased by having been there all those years. I still break this out and play it from time to time, both in person and over on GameTableOnline (where you can even play against an AI), and I enjoy it with 3, 4, or 5 players (which is actually a bit unusual for me). Meanwhile, I did want to call out Railroad Tycoon since I think it's quite a well-done train game. Probably the best train game of the decade, assuming you have a good space for setting up the massive board (edging out Ticket to Ride and Thurn and Taxis).

     2006 - Through the Ages
I have been playing the hell out of this game non-stop since I was introduced to it early in 2009. It is quite long (figure 90 minutes per player unless everyone really knows what they're doing, and even then it's still 4 hours for a 3-player game) and it is both complicated and unforgiving (unlike most other civilization-building games you cannot ignore military ... if you fall behind you will get crushed and never be able to recover). However, the hard-core gamer side of my crowd seems to agree with me that it is remarkably well balanced and the way in which you shuffle the decks and then draft the cards works out to give it a shocking amount of re-playability. I've now played around 50 games of it and I continue to be surprised by the ways in which games can evolve. A lot of the skill in the game is being able to improvise and take advantage of whatever opportunities the game has randomly presented you with. In that sense, it actually reminds me a lot of Magic (which I still consider to be the best strategy game of all time), only if Magic games took 4 hours to play themselves out.

     2007 - Agricola
A truly great "thinking" game and totally worthy of the #1 spot on Board Game Geek. It's got a lot of "fiddly bits," but I wouldn't cut any of them even if I could. The mechanics are tied together really well and this game shows once again how much re-playability you can get from shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing out some of the resources randomly. Interestingly, the German game critics who award Spiel des Jahres every year for the best "family style" board game called out a separate category for "Complex Games" so that they could acknowledge how good this was with a special prize.

     2008 - Dominion
Pure awesome, and I was glad to see it win Spiel des Jahres. The idea of constructing your deck on the fly by buying cards each turn that you then shuffle in so you can draw them on future turns is really brilliant. I wish the expansions were able to live up to the promise of the base game, but so far they have not. So far most of the cards in the expansions just make the game more complicated, which I guess might make some people happy as the original card set can start to feel like a solved puzzle if you've played it hundreds of times, however my advice is just to stick to the base game and to introduce it to all of your friends. If you're reading this blog then I'm sure all your gamer-friends will like it and even some of the ones who don't normally like games will probably like it too.

     2009 - Smallworld?
Here's where I'm supposed to end the blog entry by crowning a winner for the year that has just ended, but I'm not sure i have anything compelling to say. The Agricola expansion that just came out (Farmers of the Moor) seems really good, but I've only played it a couple of times and I'm not sure an expansion is supposed to qualify as the best game of the year (though this one might be a special case as it changes the game dramatically and the new game seems to be really good). Vlaada Chvatil's latest game (Dungeon Lords) has me pretty excited, and it does have a 2009 publication date according to the 'Geek, but it has yet to be distributed in the States so I haven't played it yet. I guess Smallworld is the best new game I have played this year. It's got some flaws (primarily that it's vulnerable to politics because using table talk to convince your opponents to attack your other opponents is very powerful), but the flavor is awesome and the mechanics are definitely fun as long as you aren't taking things too seriously. It you like multi-player Magic then I highly recommend it, but if you hate multi-player Magic then you probably won't want to play it more than 2 or 3 times.

My top 3 overall for the decade would be Dominion, Agricola, and Through the Ages. TTA is my personal favorite, but the ordering of which I want to play at any given time changes completely depending on who I am playing with, how hard-core they are, and how much time we have to play.

There you go, the decade in board games from the perspective of a thinking gamer.

Great day for spectating

Randy Buehler — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:33:00 GMT

Between a the final table of the World Series of Poker, a Magic Grand Prix in Paris, and a couple of good college football games, today is shaping up to be a day full of checking in on the TV and the computer in between playing games with Kira.

I'm actually quite torn when it comes to (American) college football's lack of a championship game. On the one hand the gamer in me is horrified at how patently unfair the whole set-up is. It feels wrong that you can run the table without even getting a chance at winning the title, plus the lack of a playoff or a real national championship game both feel like lost opportunities. However, I have to admit that the set-up makes me much, MUCH more interested in every random weekend of games. If they actually had a playoff system, there's no way I would care about a random Iowa game on a random weekend in November. Without that playoff system, though, I was delighted to find it on ESPN 360, stunned to find out that Iowa's come-from-behind miracle-maker at QB was out injured, and watched much of the 4th quarter attentively as their national championship dreams ended.

Now I might have watched Alabama - LSU anyway since I went to school in the SEC (at Vanderbilt) and still follow SEC football and basketball reasonably closely, but the BCS implications raise the stakes significantly and turned it into must-see TV for me. All in all the fact that their system is patently unfair somehow works out to make it more compelling to watch. While I do love "March Madness," I also know in my heart that I watch very little regular season college basketball. And if there's enough people like me (and I suspect that there are), then can you really blame them for not having a playoff?

As far as the Grand Prix goes, I'm disappointed to see that martin Juza just got eliminated in the last round of day 1. 1961 players makes it the largest Magic tournament of all time, which is certainly a cool storyline to follow, but I feel like Martin has caught a couple of bad breaks this season and deserved to catch a good one here (esp. with Watanabe not in attendance). For those who don't follow Magic, the Player of the Year title is almost certainly the most prestigious title given out each year. Juza is in 2nd place despite being DQed on a pretty bad judge call late in a GP that he was poised to make Top 8 in, plus going 6-0 on day 2 of another GP only to discover that he missed Top 8 on tiebreakers because they weren't running enough rounds (a rule that has already been changed as of Paris). Anyway, seems like a really quality player and if he doesn't catch those two bad beats then Watanabe's 9-point lead would be much smaller, and possibly completely gone.

The WSOP always sucks me in as well. I think Magic is a more pure test of gamer-skill than poker, but the fan in me loves all the history and context around the World Series. As I type this Phil Ivey is chipping up nicely having risked moving his chips all-in once without getting a call already. I think they're playing down to 2 today and then they play the heads up battle late Monday night / Tuesday morning so that they can broadcast the final table Tuesday night on ESPN without having had the result scooped by that day's newspapers.

The winner gets $8.5 million dollars, but Ivey apparently has enough side bets going that if he pulls this off he would win another $6 million! In a weird way that actually means he could win more than the $12 million that Jaime Gold won a couple years ago, which is still the record for the biggest tournament payout ever (across any sport ever, if I'm not mistaken). I have found pokernews.com to be the best site for following hand by hand updates. I'm tempted not to follow it so that Tuesday's broadcast will be more dramatic, but they cut so much and I enjoy knowing the details of who is playing tight versus who is opening a ton of pots so I think I'll be refreshing all day.

And that's just Saturday! Tomorrow has day 2 of the GP plus I'm in two fantasy football leagues plus I still have to figure out who to take in my NFL "suicide pool" (where you must pick one winning team per week but you can never reuse a team). We're down to 5 people and I still have the nice, safe Indianapolis Colts available to me, but there's never going to be another week where Seattle is an option (they're decimated by injuries again this year, but they're hosting the dreadful Detroit Lions). I think I'm going to split the difference and save the Colts for later by picking the Falcons over the Redskins.

Looks like an in-person Through The Ages game is coming together for Sunday evening, plus I've got a couple of late night Dragon Age sessions to look forward to so it's going to be quite a fun weekend of not actually doing anything consequential.

Gamer Life Update

Randy Buehler — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:39:00 GMT

What follows is a fairly stream of consciousness run-down of the games I've been playing for the last couple of months.

Through The Ages (TTA) has almost certainly been the thing I have played the most. It's essentially Civilization turned back into a tabletop game by Czech board game designer Vlaada Chvatil. It's not for the faint of heart (clocking in somewhere north of one hour per player), but it's remarkably well designed and well balanced. Well, it is once you know what you're doing anyway. The way in which you draft cards from a shuffled deck gives it remarkable re-playability, but only if you've learned that falling behind on military means almost certain death (the game is quite unforgiving if you fall behind). Lately my crew has been playing via e-mail using a Vassal module of the game in addition to playing it live. I've even got a spreadsheet now with our last ten results and counting. Mike Turian is the best - probably not a surprising result to anyone who has tried any form of drafting game against him.

Agricola is still in heavy rotation as well. Once I invest the time it takes to learn a game, I like to keep playing it. As a result my favorite games tend to be the ones with sufficient randomness in the set-up that each game is unique. That way, you learn some over-arching truths about what matters or what sorts of strategies tend to do well, but you're forced to improvise essentially every single time you play. Magic has this characteristic too -- you're constantly learning new tricks that you can apply int he future, but you can never learn enough to just play by rote memory. In Agricola there's a nice core mechanic where you take turns deciding which action you want to do (somewhat similar to Puerto Rico, but with more options available). The real depth, though, comes from the deck of Occupations and the deck of Minor Improvements. You get a hand of 7 of each at the start of the game and much of the game-play comes from trying to maximize those resources while also reacting to whatever your opponents have put into play.

I know an Agricola expansion came out at Essen last week. It looks like they made some fairly major changes to the core mechanics. Has anyone played it yet? How is it?

Congrats to Donald X. Vaccarino and Dominion on winning Spiel des Jahres, by the way. That's a great game that I can recommend to just about anyone. The only thing resembling a complaint that I have about it is that the first expansion seemed a bit too busy as compared to the base set. I haven't had the chance to play the second expansion yet. Hopefully, he finds his voice and keeps this game fresh and vibrant for years to come.

I've also been dabbling in iPhone games pretty consistently. Drop7 remains one of my staple games, by the way. I know I recommended it before but it's really quite a nice game for anyone who has ever enjoyed Minesweeper, Tetris, or Sudoku. I kind of wish there were new goals to shoot for (a weekly friends leaderboard would go a long way toward keeping me invested), but even just trying to up my all-time high score and my average is enough to keep me playing in spare moments.

The other infatuation I had was a surprising one to me: I Dig It. It didn't seem like something I would like, but Richard Garfield recommended it so I tried it out. In retrospect I still don't understand exactly why i liked it, but I definitely did. I completed both the campaigns modes (each of which takes several hours of accumulated play, and that's after you figure out the basics and stopped accidentally getting yourself killed). The idea is that you have some sort of funky bulldozer that goes underground and digs up various valuable things - ores, gems, alien artifacts, etc. You start with a small gas tank, a tiny cargo hold, crappy radar, and an engine that overheats if you go very deep into the earth. As you dig stuff up and sell it, you can improve each of these things in what amounts to a fairly clever twist on the usual RPG level-up mechanic (flavored totally differently, and feeling totally different, but tapping into that same emotional love we all have of seeing our stats get bigger). It's more than just bigger numbers, though, you also feel more powerful. the kicker for me is that on top of all that there's this coolness that comes from building your own tunnel system. It's like a weird form of emergent gameplay -- I'd never really thought about the most convenient way to dig mine shafts, but it was fun.

One game that I want to like is Dungeon Hunter. It looks like a fairly slick Diablo variant, and I played a ton of Diablo II back in the day. It's got nice graphics and seems to have all the action RPG goodness you'd want. I get occasional framerate issues on my 3G (which probably means it's great on a 3GS and bad on the original iPhone). My real issue, though, is that I'm stuck. If anyone knows where the hell the exit is from the Thamos Catacombs, please tell me.

In terms of tower defense games, I've played several lately. The Creeps has a cute mechanic where you have to attack the land around the track so as to clear spaces for future towers. Decent, but nothing earthshattering. Defender Chronicles is probably the tower defense game I have liked the most since finishing Field Runners. I like what they've done with altitude as an important consideration and it's well polished in addition. However, I lost a lot of interest in it once I realized that it's a grinding game -- you have a hero who levels up as you play and it means that when you're having trouble with a level you probably just need to go beat the earlier levels again so you'll be stronger. Yuck. I want my tower defense levels to be self-contained puzzles that require me to be clever. Meanwhile, my office-mates at Mind Control all seem to love GeoDefense. I'm not sure why it failed to grab me, but the fact that several of them really love it means it's probably the one to check out if you only check out one of these (esp. since it has a lite version).

I've also been playing some with Zendikar on Magic Online. It seems like a decent draft format. It's quite fast, but I like the return to normalcy that comes from have 1 and 2 color decks, where it matters that you can read and send signals during the draft.

I've also played a ton of games with Kira -- my 5-year old daughter. That's probably a subject worthy of a blog on its own, though. Suffice it to say that she's now old enough to think strategically, which is super fun to watch evolve, and Pokemon is teaching her to do math.

Work Life Update

Randy Buehler — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:17:00 GMT

I feel a little bit bad about neglecting this blog for the past few months, but it's actually mostly a good thing. It's a sign that my brain has been occupied with my job and I've been able to channel my excess mental energy into Project Mind Twist. I'll follow up shortly with a different entry about the games I've been playing lately, but enough people have been asking me how the project is going that I figured I'd just post about it.

As I posted here, Mind Twist is a free-to-play turn-based strategy game designed by Richard Garfield and developed by Mind Control Software, where I work as VP of Business Strategy (a job which is equal parts business development, product strategy, and Mind Twist). Living in Seattle and working for a company in California is not the ideal set-up, but I love the project and I love the people I get to work with so I'm pretty happy all in all. I wasn't sure how much I would like working from home 2/3rds of the time (and flying down to the Bay Area and staying in a hotel the other 1/3). It turns out I'm not a huge fan. I can see why some people would like the freedom to sleep in and not have to take a shower right away in the morning, but I for one prefer going into an office and being able to feed off the energy of all the other people. Working from home I feel a bit out of touch and it's just a little bit less fun. Like I said, though, I love both the project and the people so I'm not giving up the job. On the other hand, I also like my Seattle-based circle of friends, my house, my daughter's school, and my wife likes her job so I'm not moving. Meh. It's not quite ideal, but it's still plenty good.

Working for a small company is pretty different than working for Wizards/Hasbro. Mind Control is very nimble and very talented, but there's always this danger looming a couple of months away that we could just plain run out of money. The way an indie dev studio works is you have one or more "work for hire" projects where some bigger company (usually a publisher) is paying you to make the game they want made and then you use the profits from that game in order to fund the game you want to make. That's the way Mind Control has operated historically, but now in addition to pursuing work-for-hire we've also been looking for investors who believe in our business plan enough to invest directly in the company. Along those lines I'm delighted to report that we'll be closing an angel investment round later this month. It's not enough money to keep the company solvent all the way through the launch of Mind Twist, but it's enough to relieve the stress that comes when you are in between work-for-hire gigs.

As far as the project itself goes, we completed a successful "pre-production" period and we have a prototype that's playable on both iPhone and PC (including one against the other) which we believe demonstrates that the game design is good. I'm actually quite impressed with how deep and re-playable the game is. I mean, I knew it was Richard and I liked it when he first described it, but it's worked out even better than I thought it would. The game has now been in full development mode for a while and we're far enough along to start thinking about how our Friends and Family Alpha is going to work, and whether we can get it up and running before the end of the year. Edge Online did a nice interview with Richard and I last week that you can read here if you want more info about the game.

I guess that's the update. Cool project, cool people, cool job, and I feel pretty good about my role in helping the company raise enough money to bring Richard's latest vision to life.

More Hall of Fame thoughts

Randy Buehler — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:01:00 GMT

Miscellaneous thoughts and things I have discovered as I finalize my ballot for this year's Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame:

One guy who is getting some attention that I haven’t mentioned before is Masashiro Kuroda. He’s got an impressive 121 points in just13 appearances, by far the highest points / PT on the ballot. To be fair,though, he’s got 7 GP T8’s factoring in there and his median PT finish is just103^rd. Brian Selden is much more impressive to me if you want ashort-career guy: 3 T8’s and a win in just 14 PT’s attended, with a median finish of 37^th. That’s the 3^rd best median finish on the ballot yet somehow this guy only got 1 vote last year?

Meanwhile, if you want to go by raw play skill, Neil Reeves and Baby Huey (aka William Jensen) deserve a lot of consideration.

Mark Justice’s median finish of 28.5 and his 4 T8’s in just 18appearances continues to impress me, by the way. And some would argue that his true peak actually pre-dates the Pro Tour. (Justice’s 3-year “peak median”finish is an insane 13^th. That ties him with Finkel for the best of all-time. The next highest in the history of the game is me at 18^th,but I didn’t attend enough events to qualify based on the way Wizards is currently calculating the stat. Kai is next at 23rd.) Quite simply, Justice was The Man for those first few seasons.

OMFG I knew I was voting for Kamiel but a median finish of36^th across *45* Pro Tours?! Unprecedented. Karsten at 47^this the only other guy among the 15 on the ballot with 35+ PT’s attended who even finished Top 70 at half of their events. Budde’s median finish was 42^nd (in 42 events). Finkel’s,when elected, was 52^nd in 47 events. Most folks have a couple year stretch where they are awesome and then a couple years where they are hanging out enjoying their ride on the train. Kamiel just stayed consistently great for most of a decade.

Shvartsman – median finish of 92.5. I know the 21 GP T8’s look impressive, but he traveled to a lot of GP's where he was the only American and this was an era where the Japanese were not yet good enough to compete and win on an international stage.

Long – Imagine if we had a time machine and could go back to the beginning and convince WotC to spin Mike as a face rather than a heel. Now imagine that WotC had spun Olle Rade as Mr. Sketchy (which would not have been hard to do, especially given his talent for recognizing the inconsistencies on the backs of Magic cards that used to plague WotC’s print runs). Their HoF fortunes would be reversed, right? Long has become the poster child of all that is evil, but I think his reputation is probably worse than he deserves. He certainly embraced that reputation, encouraged it, and used it to his advantage; but it’s hard to blame him for cooperating with WotC’s attempt to make the Pro Tour into compelling theater. We all want the prize money to keep flowing, and ideally to grow, so we all tend to cooperate with whatever PR initiatives Wizards is trying. For the early years of the PT Wizards was hoping the game could have mass appeal and that the Pro Tour would become a spectator sport. They desperately wanted the PT to have compelling characters that could appeal to even non-playing spectators and they applied a number of lessons from professional wrestling to their promotional efforts. Are we sure they were wrong? When push comes to shove I actually can imagine myself voting for Long, though I haven’t done so yet and as a point of principle I don’t think I’m going to consider it unless the iconic “white hat” (Chris Pikula) gets voted into the Hall first.

Everyone with 300 or more lifetime pro points has gotten in on their 1^st ballot appearance. That’s good news for Antoine and Kamiel, not that they need it as most ballots I have seen discussed publicly seem to include them both. (By the way, did you know that Antoine’s brother Olivier Ruel is now only 23 points behind Kai for #1 all-time?)

Since year 1, only one person with less than 200 lifetime Pro Points has been voted in: me at 126. And I’m a pretty weird case, as I’m sure lots of the votes I got were based on my overall service to the game from inside Wizards R&D, inside the commentary booth, etc. Justice and Pikula both have 133, and Long is at 191. That said, both Rade and Comer got in below 200 (198 in Comer's case, though I think it was like 192 or 194 when he was voted in). Mostly I think the early years of the PT are both more influential and also had fewer Pro Points in the system but for anyone being added to the ballot now you pretty much need 200 or you aren't going to get serious consideration.

Justin Gary. The case lives here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/HallOfFame.aspx?x=mtgevent/hof/06ballot1aand basically comes down to this: how impressed are you by 8 consecutive Top 32finishes when only one of them is a Top 8? How about 11 T-32’s out of 13 PT’s?Personally, I’m pretty impressed.

A sneak peek at next year: Nassif finally gets officially coronated. Saito seems pretty obvious as well and then after that it looks like an interesting collection of specialists and/or short career guys and/or we get to find out how deep into the Japanese invasion of the PT the line for the Hall of Fame is going to be drawn: Akira Asahara, Eugene Harvey, Rich Hoaen, Anton Jonsson, Shu Komura, Katsuhiro Mori, Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, Shota Yasooka, etc.

Announcing Project Mind Twist

Randy Buehler — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:44:00 GMT

The official press release announcing the collaboration I put together between Richard Garfield and Mind Control Software is going out today. In addition, there's a spiffy new website to promote the game plus you can now follow us on twitter (@TheMindTwist) and/or become a fan on facebook. Finally, there's an exclusive interview about the project on Gamasutra with Richard and Mind Control's CEO, Andrew Leker.

The short version of all this is that I now have a job at a kick-ass independent video game developer called Mind Control Software and Mind Control is in the process of expanding their Orbital platform infrastructure technology in order to be able to do everything I've ever dreamed of wanting to do with a multi-player online strategy game. The Richard Garfield-designed, free-to-play-but-with-microtransactions-we-hope-you'll-want-to-buy project (aka "Mind Twist") will be our first release, but there are other games in the pipeline as well.

Mind Control, by the way, is a 33-person studio that has spent the last year building Vector City Racers, which is a casual car-driving MMO built in flash and targeted at 6-12 year old boys. The engineers have performed what sound to me like miracles in order to build a real-time 3D game in flash, and get it from green-light to open beta in less than a year, so I know they can handle this one. The trickiest bit is that right now we're funding Mind Twist internally, out of profits from Vector City Racers. We'd rather have an influx of cash so that we can pour more resources into Mind Twist and get it out sooner. My current job is to try to find someone to give us that money ... so if you happen to know (or to be) an angel investor or a venture capitalist that wants to invest in an online game/platform play, please do drop me a line as I've got a rock-solid business plan I'd like to share with you.

As for the rest of you, I'll do my best to keep you updated and I'm sure I'll eventually be fishing here for willing guinea pigs / beta testers.

Celebrity Apprentice

Randy Buehler — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:15:00 GMT

(Pardon the dated-ness, but I was in some conversations about this last weekend and now I have a compelling urge to set my thoughts down somewhere ... which is the whole point of having a blog, right?)

So I was really enjoying the Celebrity Apprentice this season up until it turned into wrestling. I thought Trump was running a skill-game. Sure he made the occasional decision based on dramatic impact / ratings (usually keeping a controversial contestant around for a couple shows longer than they deserve), but in the end it seemed like by and large the best players won. However this season the best player, by far, was Annie Duke and yet in the end Joan Rivers was crowned victorious.

As far as I can tell, Trump just plain decided that he wanted Joan to win. She's a friend of the family, she's contemplating a reality TV career of her own, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure she and her daughter Melissa were just playing characters for the entire length of the show. Joan and Melissa (and the editors) did their best to turn Annie into a heel, and I can kind of see why Annie might rub some people the wrong way, but from my seat it was Joan and Melissa who were just embarrassing awful people. Annie was brutally effective at winning pretty much constantly, and she was also pretty consistently professional, especially in the board room. Meanwhile, Joan's attacks were personal, uncalled for, and her dismissive attitude toward poker players as a class pissed me off. Like I said, in retrospect I think Joan must have been playing a character the whole time ... I just don't believe she's really like that.

The point where I starting to suspect something was rotten was an episode about two-thirds of the way where Joan was a project manager for a task where each team has to auction off jewelry. Joan's team lost, which is always a very dangerous occurance for the PM, but Trump never even seemed to consider firing her. The loss got blamed on their jewelry selection and so the young, pretty professional golfer woman (Natalie Gulbis) who did the selection got fired, but here's the thing: Joan knew exactly what kind of jewelry should have been selected (big, dangly things that would show well on a runway), but she never gave that information to Natalie. She delegated a task that she knew how to do to an unqualified person without giving that person any guidance. And this loss is Natalie's fault? I'm not buying it ... and I was genuinely surprised, at the time, that Trump did buy it.

Like I said, I thought I was watching a skill-game. Previous seasons have featured some really smart game-playing, from the woman who won a Central Park taxi-service challenge by figuring out to sell advertising for the side of the taxi to Gene Simmons who broke the format wide-open last year by figuring out to hit up his rich friends for donations.

In the end, though, this series seems to have degenerated into merely another reality TV show. I feel sorry for Annie as I don't think she ever figured this out. In the last minute of the finale Trump does his summation and looks at her and says "Annie ... I think you know what I'm going to say." Her eyes lit up and she leaned forward with a big smile expecting to hear good news ... only to have Trump rip off his mask and reveal Vince McMahon. Oh well, I don't watch professional wrestling and I guess now I don't watch any reality TV either.

Galaxy Trucker

Randy Buehler — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:42:00 GMT

Marc Leblanc turned me on to this board game. He's one of the superstars at my new company, Mind Control Software, and he's also the kind of guy who walks around with an encyclopedia inside his head that seems to contain every game ever made, whether tabletop or digital. For example, here's the actual conversation where I learned that this game exists: I was singing the praises of Through The Ages. It's long and definitely not a game you want to try with your more casual board gamer friends, but totally worth the 1+ hours per person in my opinion. I blogged about it a bit here and it's still in heavy rotation with the hard-core part of the Wizards crowd. Anyway, I described it as being by "some Czech game designer" and he responded "Vlaada Chvatil?" I said I thought that sounded right, and he told me I should try Chvatil's latest game: Galaxy Trucker.

In Galaxy Trucker you first have to assemble your spaceship out of Carcasonne-style tiles that have things like engines, guns, crew quarters, and cargo bays on them. Then everybody's ships are subjected to a (somewhat) random collection of obstacles as they fly around and try to collect cargo to sell. The flavor is actually pretty awesome and as a generator of cool narratives I like the game a lot. There's also some really cool mechanical elements in the game. However, as published I'm not actually a fan of the way the rules work.

The problem for me is that the ship construction itself is actually a twitch game masquerading as a thinking game. The rules for ship construction work like this: You can only have one tile in your hand at a time and once you place a tile onto your ship then you can never move it. All the tiles start out face-down and anytime you like you can pick one up and turn it over. If you don't attach it to your ship then you put it back face-up and anyone else can then take it for their ship. So what this turns into is a mad scramble where you're constantly scanning all the rejected face-up tiles and looking for the perfect one. Furthermore, whoever finishes first gets a head start in the obstacle course portion of the game, which is a pretty nice advantage. Did I mention that after you start building your ship you're also allowed to look at some of the hidden obstacles that you'll be flying through? There's just way too much information there for anyone who hasn't played the game dozens of times to parse.

Ship construction seems like it could be (should be?) this cool experience of min-maxing various aspects of your ship given some random resources and some (but not complete) knowledge of the hidden obstacles to come. But in practice it's a twitch game. How quickly can you grab tiles, parse their consequences, and attach them to your ship? I'm being a little bit unfair, since the game does reward quick-thinking rather than pure twitch, but the whole experience just felt really bad to me. Robo Rally is probably the most similar game I have played but Robo Rally is better in that a) You don't have to track what cards your opponents are programming (or choosing not to program), b) you don't get punished for being the last person to decide how to play out the turn unless you take significantly longer than your opponents (which seems fair to punish), and c) there's more randomness in resolution such that you aren't punished nearly as badly for making mistakes.

I think I would like Galaxy Trucker a lot more if each player got dealt a random selection of tiles and then had to construct their ship out of those. Now you can't accomplish everything you might want to (so you don't have to feel bad about not being perfect) and now you don't have this wonky interaction with your opponets that gives a huge advantage to experienced players.

All in all, Galaxy Trucker has enough cool elements that it could be a game I really like, but only if you replace the twitchy ship construction phase with something more like a "sealed deck" experience. Meanwhile, the game is nothing whatsoever like Through The Ages, which is pretty impressive and means that Vlaada Chvatil is a name well worth remembering.

My Hall of Fame Ballot

Randy Buehler — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:09:00 GMT

Wizards should be releasing the ballots for this year’s ProTour Hall of Fame any week now. I think this year is a “catch up” year. There are 2-3 obvious HoFers who are on the ballot for the first time (Antoine Ruel, Kamiel Corneleissen, and probably Frank Karsten) but after that I think we should allbe debating which old-timers deserve a spot. From my seat, that conversation boils down to Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz, Chris Pikula, and Justin Gary. You could make a case for a few others (Billy Jensen, Scott Johns and Mark Justice in particular) and folks will make cases that I don’t personally believe in for some other fine folks (Pat Chapin, Antonino De Rosa and Alex Shvartsman), but here’s the way I see it and the way I’m voting:

The case for Chris

I like that the Hall of Fame is about more than just results. Chris had a decent career as a player - 3 PT Top 8’s, 4 GP Top 8’s, an Invitational win – but there aren’t enough slots available to let in everyone with that resume. Instead the case for Chris is all about the tremendous impact he had on the game as a personality and a community builder. I made this case in my year 1 ballot, and upon re-reading that I’m really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best things I ever wrote about the Pro Tour and I’d encourage you to go follow that link now.Seriously, I want to say all those things again, but I’m not going to be able to write them any better. I’ll wait.

In addition, we have an opportunity this year to try to right a wrong on Chris’s behalf. Lots of folks (myself included), think it was a mistake for Wizards to take away his Meddling Mage art when they reprinted the card. Let’s give Chris a ring to replace it with.

The case for Steve

Pop quiz time: Who has more lifetime Pro Points – Mike Turian or Steve OMS? (The answer is Steve, at 237.) Who has more Grand Prix Top 8’s –Dirk Baberowski, Ben Rubin, or Steve OMS? (Steve has more than those two combined, 3 to 6 to 10.) How many people have finished Top 4 in two different Player of the Year races and then failed to get voted into the Hall of Fame? (Just Steve.)

I guess folks are looking at the mere 3 Pro Tour Top 8’s on Steve’s resume and deciding that somehow doesn’t measure up, but that just seems short-sighted to me. If we decided to make a big deal about finals or semi-finals appearances then his 3would look really good (he’s got a 1^st, a 2^nd, and a 3rdin his three Sunday appearances). Meanwhile, if we were including Junior Pro Tour results in these stats then he would look even better.

Mostly, the case for Steve OMS is that for about 4-5 years he was one of the best couple of players in the game. He’s a bit overshadowed by his buddy Jon, but it was Steve who taught first the east coast and then the Pro Tour how to draft. It was Steve who won the most Grand Prix when Jon,Steve, and I became the first players to start traveling internationally for them. And it’s Steve who is the most deserving of a catch-up vote for the ProTour Hall of Fame this year. He finished 7^th, 10^th, and 7^ththe last three years so I think he’s got a very legitimate shot this year.

The case for Justin

If you liked my year 1 ballot and you’re on a roll, here’s a link to my year 2 ballot as well. I think it’s decent, but I’m not as proud of it, especially since my statistical argument against Justin Gary is just wrong. The stat I was grasping for but failed to find at the time is “peak median finish.” Median finish seems like a good way in theory to judge which players were consistently good rather than which caught the lucky breaks necessary to put up a bunch of Top 8’s. However, median finish is dragged down by all the times guys will show up for Tour after their prime is over just because it’s fun to hang out and play. That shouldn’t somehow make them *worse* candidates, right? So take everyone’s best 3-year run and look at their median finish during that run … and Justin Gary in his prime is revealed as one of the best on Tour with an outstanding peak median finish of 25^th.That’s actually better than all five guys who got voted in last year, and the only person on the ballot with a better run is Mark Justice. Meanwhile, he’s also got two US national team appearances, including an individual win for himself and a team world championship.

Justin is competing with Karsten for a spot on my ballot right now. Their resumes are pretty similar with 3 Top 8’s each. Justin has the US Nationals performances but Karsten has 30 more lifetime Pro Points (280 to250). I suspect that Karsten’s writing and community building efforts will ultimately get him the nod, but I want to see the official WotC stats and listen to what others have to say about this year’s ballot before I finally make up my mind.

Randy Buehler’s Ballot:

Antoine Ruel

Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz

Kamiel Corneleissen

Chris Pikula

Justin Gary / Frank Karsten

Bejeweled Blitz Addiction

Randy Buehler — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:22:04 GMT

I am completely and thoroughly addicted to Bejeweled Blitz right now. BB is a slick mini-version of the classic match-three game that PopCap has put onto facebook in an effort to advertise the full version, along with their other games. It's pretty simple: score as many points as you can in one minute, but the genius part comes from all the ways in which they're using facebook.

Having been both a Magic player and a Magic developer, I already understand how effective "organized play" can be at getting you sucked deeper and deeper into a hobby. It's both aspirational (in that you get the chance to try to be the best at something) and inspirational (in that going to an event and seeing how many other people are also playing this game makes you feel like you're part of something big and important (rather than just wasting your time)). I think a big part of what's going on with Bewjewled Blitz is that online games are finally starting to figure out how to take advantage of social networking in order to tap into those emotions.

The first and almost certainly the most impactful tactics they're using is that they have a leaderboard that shows you how your best score for the week stacks up against your friends list. This is a mechanic that Who Has the Biggest Brain also uses pretty effectively - "There's no way that {so-and-so} is better / smarter than me, I'll just have to play some more and take up my rightful place higher on the leaderboard." This is probably the most impactful improvement to high score board technology since coin-op Asteroids machines first gave gamers the opportunity to pretend their initials are A-S-S. The smart things they've done within the game include a) not showing you your rank with respect to the whole world, b) only tracking your single highest score (not your average or anything else that accurately measures skill as opposed to effort), and c) wiping away the scores once per week so things start over regularly. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in to everything facebook can do, like sending trash talk to your buddies, posting badges on your wall, and bragging about your high scores to your news stream audience. Ron Foster called me out by name when he hung 180k on the board last week, and I definitely plan to enjoy myself when I beat that mark.

This week they pushed a new batch of features that are definitely working their magic on me. Now they're tracking how many times you get each of the badges (25k, 50k, etc.) and they've got a system so that you level-up when you accumulate enough copies of each badge. Leveling up doesn't mean anything other than bragging rights, but it doesn't need to. Making your numbers bigger can be its own reward. (Does anyone know if Gygax invent the level-up mechanic? Or did D&D merely popularize it? It's got to be the most powerful, impactful mechanic in the history of gaming, right?)

Those of you who haven't played the Blitz variant of Bejeweled are probably wonderign what all the fuss is about, and what on earth Bejeweled is doing in this particular blog. I've thought about that some myself, too, and I think what's going on is that I really enjoy the way BB tests my ability to think quickly. The one-minute time limit makes it a very fast-paced game (and the zero-level strategy is to make matches as quickly as possible), but at the same time it's not actually a twitch game. It tests and rewards my brain's reaction time, but not my dexterity. The faster I can think and notice things, the more points I get. This is for me a stark contrast with FPS and RTS type games, where it doesn't matter how good my ability to think strategically actually is, I can't score points because I'm not nimble enough with the controls. Meanwhile, one-minute of sustained concentration can actually be a nice little adrenaline rush.

I don't seem to be the only one who likes it. 81 of my 360 friends have played this as some point with 30+ routinely earning badges every week, and I think it's only been out for a couple of months. According to facebook stats, it's got over 4 million players per month (good enough for Top 25 status amongst all facebook apps) and over a million playing it each day.

I hope PopCap is happy with it, because i want them (and others) to continue doing good quality work like this. Their monetization plan seems to be just to drive folks to their own website. They don't have any ads up except for their own stuff (well, none in addition to the ones facebook themselves always add to the page anyway). As far as their own stuff goes, I do in fact now own a copy of Plants Versus Zombies which I don't think I would even have been aware of if they hadn't tacked a preview video for it onto the front of my BBlitz experience one week.

The forums are now open if anyone else needs to admit any of their own addictions ...

Garfield on Games

Randy Buehler — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:23:00 GMT

Richard Garfield has started a blog – Games With Garfield. So far there are two podcasts (where he is joined by fellow Wizards alumni Skaff Elias and Tyler Bielman), an intriguing outline of a methodology for reviewing games, and a description of a 52-card card game. Assuming he keeps at it, this should become a compelling stop for me as I browse the internet.

Podcast 1 – Cooperative games

The opening “tabletop gaming news” section is a bit rough. They clearly haven’t found their voice yet. However, the stuff on cooperative games is really interesting. These are big-brained guys trying to understand what makes games tick. Pandemic is fun, but their critique of it and all cooperative games is dead on: one player can play for everyone. They discuss several ways to solve this problems … I had never thought of role-playing as a solution for this particular problem, but it does actually work. I also hadn’t really thought of time pressure as the primary way that computer games solve this problem, but again their analysis seems spot on.

Most of their conversation lives on a meta-level – the conversation is about game design, not game strategy. That said, I strongly suspect that most strategy gamers would find this stuff interesting.

Podcast 2 – Variation in set-up

I really enjoyed this one. Hearing Richard talk about Cosmic Encounter and how his experiences with that game inspired his design of Magic is still inspirational despite the fact that I’ve heard the story several times before. Listening to these guys discuss Dominion’s family tree is also cool. The Magic and D&D stuff is awesome, but then they take on golf … and Skaff’s take on miniature golf is even awesomer.

Their discussion of the way in which variation in set-up gives games replayability sheds light nicely on the distinction between Agricola and Le Havre that I have been attempting (less articulately) to make in previous blog entries. Agricola is like Magic in that you get a random hand of cards to play with and that can send each game in a very different direction. Le Havre, on the other hand, has much less variety in the way you set things up. Sure there is some, and it’s possible that I haven’t played enough to appreciate how impactful the small differences actually are each time, but I doubt it. Le Havre seems more like Bridge – it’s not precisely identical each time you play, but the diversity / replayability pales in comparison to Magic.

Threats to Magic

Randy Buehler — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:50:00 GMT

The Magic world is buzzing right now about a slate of rules changes that were just announced, but I for one don’t think they are much of a threat to the game. The only one which should even be controversial is the elimination of “damage on the stack” tricks and (for reasons I will detail below) I think that’s going to turn out fine. The biggest threat to Magic right now, in my opinion, is actually coming from an entirely different direction. I walked away from my weekend at Pro Tour Honolulu depressed about the state of Alara-block constructed. At first I thought I disliked the format because everyone’s mana sucked, but upon further review I think I have a more subtle and potentially more interesting critique: Where have all the instants gone?

M10 Rules Changes

I knew these changes were coming from my time before I left Wizards in January, though I only got the chance to play a small handful of games with them. I think all of us need to actually play a bunch with the modifications to the combat step before we jump to too many conclusions, but with that caveat in place I’m not going to let my lack of experience stop me from speculating.

I had the same knee-jerk reaction to the proposal that everyone else is having: I’m all for bringing new players into Magic, but not at the cost of making the game less interesting. (Aka: “Please don’t fuck up my game for the sake of some imaginary brain-dead newbies.”) Here’s the thing though … are we sure the new rules are dramatically less interesting? While R&D’s motivation for the changes is to make the game simpler, Aaron Forsythe makes a very different defense of the new combat rules on his Facebook wall:

Using the old damage-stacking cards correctly just got more difficult. Try blocking with a Siege-Gang and a Husk now and figuring out what to do. There are sacrifices to make (literally and figuratively) and it isn't just "best possible outcome all my guys live and yours die once again". The game is still quite, quite difficult. And this doesn't cater to the bottom 10%. It also doesn't cater to the top 10%.”

He’s right that damage-on-the-stack always works out to let you do everything you want to do. The new system is in fact going to force some interesting trade-offs. While some game-play goes away, some other game-play decisions are actually created where no interesting decisions existed before. At first blush it seems like fewer options is just bad, but there’s any number of Rosewater articles that argue fairly convincingly that restrictions are actually good and often breed creativity. I’m not trying to say that game-play will get more compelling for us long-time veterans, but I think a decent sized chunk of the “lost” game-play will actually be replaced with other stuff rather than lost.

(This argument is a bit reminiscent for me of arguments around the use of the designated hitter in baseball. Proponents of having the pitcher hit often argue that National League baseball has more strategy in it, but if you study the statistics it turns out that the decision to have the pitcher lay down a sacrifice bunt is so automatic that it’s the American League that actually sees more interesting and diverse managerial strategies deployed. Damage-on-the-stack-sac-my-guy is so easy and obvious that we might actually be up strategy thanks to the creation of more judgment calls.)

Meanwhile, I know that I as a good player will now have less tricks that I can deploy against mediocre players, but in my heart of hearts I actually felt guilty when I won that way. It never stopped me from using the tricks, of course. I’m way too spike-y to let a little thing like empathy get in the way of hanging a ‘W’ on the scoreboard, but I’m pretty sure most of you reading this have had the same experience of being forced to explain stack tricks to someone who is initially surprised by them. Wizards is right that they are initially counter-intuitive. Yes most people smart enough to want to play Magic can figure them out after one or two explanations, but some percentage of them will walk away from that initial negative experience, especially if it comes at the hands of some asshole at a PTQ.

And you’ve also got to admit that Wizards has a pretty good track record when it comes to shepherding our game. They never muck around with it lightly and very few of their controversial decisions look bad in hindsight. I’m struggling to even think of one.

Pro Tour Honolulu

Magic is at its most fun when it is interactive. The best moments are those when you’re trying to figure out what your opponent is up to and then trying to figure out how you can use your resources to thwart their plan. The resulting “ah-ha” moments are among the game’s most enjoyable. Unfortunately, there weren’t very many of those on display in Hawaii last weekend.

Part of the problem is that the tools available within the Shards block for fixing your mana were not up to the task of supporting all those gold cards. It’s not that the mana fixers were bad – they’re probably better than what was available in Invasion block and might be on par with Ravnica. The difference is that this time the gold block is all about 3-color shards instead of 2-color guilds. On top of that, Shards is extremely fast and aggressive. The block gives you access to very powerful spells, but in order to wield that power you pretty much have to have 3 different colors of mana available by turn 3. So it’s both faster and more color intensive than Ravnica, but the mana fixers aren’t any better. As a result there were a ton of mulligans all weekend long. The odds that both players had a playable opening 7 were depressingly small and the raw power of the cards meant that no one had any time to hiccup. If you stumbled at all you got blown out. As a result a majority of games were just blow-outs.

Things might have been better if the borderposts allowed you to return any land instead of just a basic land. As printed they do a good job in Limited, but they add a whole new level of inconsistency to constructed mana bases. Kibler went 8-1-1 with an Esper Beatdown deck that runs 8 ‘posts, but he just straight-up admits in the Deck Tech we filmed that he doesn’t actually have enough basics to support them. His plan was just to get lucky. The other break-out deck of the tournament was green-white aggro, which the Japanese ran not because it was actually good, but because it had the most consistent mana in the field and was fast enough to punish anyone who stumbled. If both players draw their mana, they are an underdog. In practice, however, they won 64% of their matches – the best winning percentage of any deck in the field with a meaningful number of people playing it.

If I want to place 60-40 bets and then just shuffle cards and see who wins, I’ll play poker. Luckily, the mana in Standard is better and this block format isn’t being used for very much.

Like I said at the top, though, I think there was a more interesting and subtle flaw buried under the mana issues. R&D has made a concerted effort to push creatures. R&D has also introduced a very powerful new card type in Planeswalkers. Both of these are valiant and successful efforts. R&D also printed cascade at a level that is very powerful in at least block constructed (jury is still out on Standard in my mind). R&D also printed a bunch of powerful sorceries, including Maelstrom Pulse, Blightning, Slave of Bolas, Martial Coup, Cruel Ultimatum, Thought Hemmorage, Identity Crisis, and Lavalanche (though the latter didn’t see much play thanks to its bad interaction with your own cascade). Throw in Behemoth Sledge plus Finest Hour and most of the action that happens in this format happens at sorcery speed. There’s no permission to speak of and while there is a decent selection of instant speed spot removal, there are really powerful trumps available like Wall of Denial (and to a lesser extent Uril).

The result of this cocktail is a format that’s really low on interactivity. One of the basic rhythms of Magic is threats versus answers. Figuring out how to play around their answers and/or how to use your own to break up their plan is fun. However, that interaction was largely missing last weekend. Even if you both drew a reasonable balance of land and spells, all those powerful sorcery-speed effects meant that the games played out more like a race between my threats and yours. The most telling sign of this was the complete lack of matches that went to extra turns. The rounds flew by all weekend long and both days ended something like an hour ahead of schedule. That’s because no one had anything to think about. Normally, at the end of 55 minutes there’s still a decent number of matches going on and a couple of them will take 10-15 minutes to resolve those last five turns. Not in Honolulu, though. There were never more than a couple of matches and those never took more than a couple of minutes.

Cascade was a big culprit here. It’s extremely powerful but doesn’t set up any interesting decisions. You pretty much just cast your cascade spell at the obvious time and then hope for the best. Opponent spun up a Blightning and all you got was a Putrid Leech? Oh well. Shuffle up and try again. See again my poker comment above … Magic should be more interactive than that. (To be fair – I do think there’s a place in the game for cascade. It’s a fun mechanic for more casual players. It just shouldn’t be pushed to a level where it’s this relevant to high-level constructed tournaments. Hopefully it’s enough weaker in Standard that it only infects this one weekend.)

I don’t think there was a concerted plan on R&D’s part to remove interactivity from the game or anything, but I do think it’s something they should be paying more attention to and I hope they don’t look at the diversity of decks that did well in Honolulu and conclude that the format was actually good. It wasn’t fun and even the pros who normally like constructed were looking for bridges to go jump off of.

I think this lack of instants was accidental and very optional. R&D has made some nice strides toward reducing board complexity and making the game more accessible. Having creatures as 2-for-1’s can be interesting as well, but at the same time I think they’ve started making too much use of “french vanilla” keywords like shroud and lifelink. They’ve also let the creature curve get too inflated relative to the spells and they’re spending too many of their constructed points on sorceries.

In summation: Wall of Denial is dumb. Permission is not. And we’ll all be better at making judgment calls before damage is dealt than our newbie opponents.

P.S. My favorite story from PT Honolulu comes from a feature match between Brand Nelson and Kazuya Mitamura. Nelson is Fffreak, a well-known Magic Online player who was making his Pro Tour debut (arguably the most anticipated Pro Tour debut ever, as it's rare that anyone knows who you are before you play on Tour). Nelson drew a brutal schedule, including a round 1 feature match against LSV (welcome to the tour!), and was in contention for most of the weekend. With five rounds to go he drew (eventual champion) Mitamura and played a brilliant game 1, using his Magma Sprays to great effect after attacking into Thrinaxes and Broodmates. He manages to exhaust Mitamura's hand and kill both halves of a Broodmate and he's got the game won, but Mitamura top-decks a second Broodmate Dragon. Nelson's response? He laughs! He's not pissed, or angry, or depressed, or frustrated. He genuinely seemed to find the situation funny. That window into Brad's psyche told me a lot about Brad's character and convinced me even more than his results that he's going to be around for a long while. Nelson lost the match but went on to finish 9th. And if Magic Online rules had been in effect and the top four tables had been unable to take intentional draws in the last round, Brad would have made Top 8.

MOCS Running Diary

Randy Buehler — Sat, 30 May 2009 19:59:00 GMT

Here's a tournament report from the Magic Online monthly championship, which I played today. It's basically a live blog that I'm updating round by round.

     The Context

I qualified by Top 8'ing two 10E sealed deck events plus winning 15 drafts over the course of the last month. The format was Alara Block Constructed, which sets it up as a potentially very interesting preview of what will happen next weekend at Pro Tour Honolulu. 243 other runners joined me, which was about 100 less than last month, presumably because those hundred folks are competing in person at Grand Prix Seattle this weekend.

(Speaking of attendance figures - holy shit! - 1127 players made the trip to Tacoma to play in the Grand Prix. The T.O. had been planning for 650 with a hopeful goal around 800, which would have been more than double the most recent GP Seattle.)

I built the obvious Jund Hackblade deck while trying to learn the format. Borderposts, Bloodhall Ooze, Putrid Leech, Hackblade, Bloodbraid, Terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, etc. It's good, but the mana is really frustrating. You need a bunch of basic lands to support the Borderposts and you have to mulligan a lot because you're only actually happy with both a basic and a 'Post and you pretty much always need all 3 colors right away as well. Anyway, it can be blisteringly fast, but it's definitely not good enough to win consistently now that it has a target on its head and 2/2 pro-red dorks and Thrinaxes have invaded everyone else's lists.

The thing is, Jund still has really powerful cards. And I think Cascade is the best card advantage in the format. Before Reborn came out I was running the closest you can get to 5-color control: 4 Courier's Capsule, 4 Esper Charm, Cruel Ultimatum, a bunch of removal, a smattering of permission, and 4 Broodmate Dragons. I love to play that style of deck, but post-Reborn blue decks simply can't keep up with the card advantage that comes from Cascade. They'd have a fighting shot if permission worked against cascade, but you aren't allowed to play enough Double Negatives to make that a fair fight.

Anyway, what I wound up doing was to take out all the balls-out aggro elements from my Jund deck and instead to go for maximum cascade card advantage and plan to win in the late game. This meant splashing white for Enlisted Wurm, but I kind of wanted to play Trace of Abundance just for the mana acceleration anyway (so I don't get run over by the aggro decks before I can get Bituminous blast online). the final touch is Uril, the Miststalker. 5/5 untargetable for 5 is awesome in a format where the average deck seems to have a dozen targeted removal spells.

     The Deck

3 Enlisted Wurm
1 Brooadmate Dragon
2 Uril, the Miststalker
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Sprouting Thrinax
4 Putrid Leech

4 Bituminous Blast
4 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Blightning
4 Terminate

4 Trace of Abundance

4 Savage Lands
4 Jungle Shrine
4 Exotic Orchard
4 Forest
4 Mountain
3 Swamp

I'm not very confident in the sideboard. The last two cards I cut were Magma Spray and Jund Charm, which I cut because all they amount to is incrementally better removal spells versus the appropriate deck. I want my sideboard cards to be more impactful than that so I went with hosers versus less popular strategies (aka Renegades and Outlanders). I should probably have the 4th Blightning in the board, but to be honest when I was finalizing the sideboard I forget I had gone down to 3 in the main. :/ The main decks seems pretty tight to me. I'm not sure what the right numbers of Enlisted Wurms or Broodmate Dragons is, but I think a mix is better than all of either. I also worry about the number of Swamps I have since you can't use them to cast Trace, but I need so much black mana for my other spells that I think I'm stuck with them. Meanwhile it's possible that the metagame will go in a direction where you don't want this much (targeted) removal, but I don't think we're in that space so all in all I feel pretty good about the main deck.

     The Matches

Round 1 - vs Caiano

Caiano seemed to have somewhat similar control-ish Cascade-ish deck, but maybe a bit less focused. In game 1 he was mana screwed and we didn't have much of a game. My Blightning showed me Ajani so i sideboard in Celestial Purge, which worked out great versus his early game 2 Thrinax. We also trade Blightnings and I get off 2 to his 1 before both our hands are empty, but when my Bloodbraid Elf flips a removal spell on an empty board and he then top-decks a second Thrinax my edge is down to 2 in-play lands. The game goes a while, which I thought would favor me (thanks to all my Cascade plus my collection of fatties) and it does. He draws a lot of individually powerful cards (including both Ajani and Scepter of Fugue), but I'm able to trade cards until I draw a Broodmate Dragon, which he can only kill half of.

1-0 (2-0)

Round 2 - vs Monkeywrenched85

He has to mulligan to 4 in game 1, but my hand is all removal and all he plays is a Wall of Denial. I eventually draw a Thrinax and then Cascade Wurm into a second one. He uses Maelstrom Pulse to turn my Thrinaxes into 6 1/1's, but I made sure to leave up Bituminous Blast mana to fizzle the second Pulse and defend my other 5 tokens, which were enough to win with even though my blast cascaded into a blank.

In game 2 I drew and/or cascaded into all 3 of my Blightnings. He was actually able to defend his hand a bit thanks to Esper Charm and 2 x Kiss of the Amesha, but while he was spending all that mana I was able to accumulate a giant horde of creatures in play. Martial coup would have been devastating but he only had 1 white mana (and no green for potential Pulses). Has Standard tricked everyone into thinking you can build a reliable 5-color control mana base? The mana in block seems to me to only support 2-color aggro or 3-color control. Of course, I may be just as guilty of this as I've convinced myself that Trace of Abundance lets me splash a bit of a 4th color into my control deck.

2-0 (4-0)

Round 3 - vs migacz

I recognize his name from my research on Top 8's of daily events so I know I'm in for a tough one. He turns out to be playing a similar deck to mine - Jund-splash-white Cascade Control - but he's using Naya Panorama and Sylvan Bounty to make the mana work and he showed me one copy each of Lavalanche, Behemoth Sledge, Ajani Vengeant, and Soul's Majesty (!) in game one. I'm not sure what he's not running other than I never saw Enlisted Wurm. At some point in the match I think I saw every other spell from my list ... maybe his Blightnings were in the board to open up that room?

In game 1 I mulligan a hand with 4 black spells and 3 lands that don't make black. We trade Putrid Leeches and Blightnings and I think I'm doomed when he plays Soul's Majesty to draw 3 on turn 5, but my second Leech is playing really good D - holding off two Thrinaxes and a Bloodbraid Elf. Luckily for me the Elf had flipped a Lavalanche (this is precisely why I'm not running Lavalanche, btw, and why i don't think you can run Martial Coup in a more white version either). Ajani makes my life annoying and then Behemoth Sledge makes it super annoying. I really needed to draw a Pulse at some point, but never did. He adds a Broodmate and I get to Bituminous Blast one dragon, but the other picks up the Sledge before I can blast it.

In game 2 I opened with two Blightnings and they were awesome. I stumbled for two turns waiting for white mana and for 6 mana but once I got there Enlisted Wurm brought Bloodbraid Elf and Putrid Leech to the party and we were off to game 3.

g3
The game was pretty quick and pretty bloody. We traded leeches and removal spells and then he played Uril. I died while holding Celestial Purge and Maelstrom Pulse. Uril continues to seem really good, especially in this metagame.

2-1 (5-2)

Round 4 - vs ElRamuuusa

Another mirror match except this guy has yet a third take on how to fix the mana: Rupture Spire.

In game 1 our Uril's implode thanks to the legend rule and then after that I draw more spells than he does. I''d love to claim credit, but he played an awful lot of land and I didn't do anything particularly clever.

Game 2 was all about Uril. He played one early and it help off my attacks forever. He got to 6 mana first and his Enlisted Wurm cascaded out Thought Hermmorage (a card I also sideboard in, planning to name Uril). He named Broodmate Dragon, which is a 1-of in my deck, and of course I was holding it in my hand. Later this game I got to Bituminous Blast my own guy for the third time -- this time it was in response to a Slave of Bolas that wanted to steal my Thrinax. (#2 was last round when I Blasted a Thrinax in response to a Celestial Purge.) I do finally get to six and play out my own Enlisted Wurm (cascadeing merely Putrid Leech). I'm actually starting to be able to attack through Uril, but he draws a ton of random damage and kills me with Blightning and Anathemancer.

Game 3 was really frustrating. He didn't play a single spell that I'm not also running ... all he did was go straight to six and summon Enlisted Wurms on 3 consecutive turns, triggering cascade an additional 4 times thanks to 2 Bloodbraids and 2 Bituminous Blasts. he also had the Pulse for my Behemoth Sledge and I just drowned under a flood of the very same card advantage my deck was designed to generate.

2-2 (6-4)

Round 5 vs Orgg Ascetic

I mulligan to 5 and my opponent curves out wall of denial, wall of denial, bituminous blast, cruel ultimatum.

In game two my Renegade nails his armillary sphere, just like I drew it up when I sideboarded out my removal spells versus his essentially creatureless deck. However, despite this he was able to cast Cruel Ultimatum on turn 7. his Wall of Denial plus my 8 lands / 6 spell ratio meant i couldn't kill him before then. Plus one of my spells was a Maelstrom Pulse that had no targets. I took out 4 x Terminate and 4 x Bituminous Blast but maybe I was supposed to take out Pulse too? Anyway, I hoped my Thought Hemmorage might be able to strip him of victory conditions, but he Swerved it and eventually killed me with Martial Coup.

I'm kind of curious what the top of the swiss is going to look like. The view from the middle is all Jund control and decks that have gone out of their way to remove all targets for Maelstrom Pulse / Terminate. Maybe I was supposed to predict this and run a bunch of Edict effects? Fleshbag Marauder would have been super sick versus my last three opponents ...

2-3 (6-6)

Round 6 vs Mizuchi

He shows up 24 seconds before timing out. I kill 3 Noble Heirarchs with a Maelstrom Pulse in game 1 and he just sits and does nothing with 3 mountains and 2 Jungle Shrines in play. Color-screwed?

Yep - color-screwed Jund player, I learn in game 2 (which I'm playing pretty much unsideboarded). The sideboarding probably didn't matter as I draw 13 lands and 8 spells and am well on my way toward tilting.

I keep forest, exotic orchard, trace in game 3 and my opponent plays forest, forest, jund panorama, exotic orchard and refuses to activate the panorama until after I'm forced to discard. Ajani then comes down and pins me on 3 mana until turn 9, by which point I've killed both halves of a Broodmate Dragon despite my screw but can't deal with Obelisk of Alara. This game can be really frustrating sometimes. 13 lands in game 2 and 3 in game 3 ... clearly I need a more "in between" amount of mana in my deck.

2-4 (7-8)

Round 7 vs Kapahala

Apparently the bottom of the swiss is where the Noble Heirarchs live as I pulse away 2 of them in game 1 on my way to a blow-out in win thanks to cascade shenanigans. His deck is

Game 2 I have mana issues and he has Elspeth. I manage kill to Elspeth, clear his hand, kill all of his creatures, and summon 10-power worth of my own but I go down to one life in the process. He top-decks Lavalanche and has enough mana to play it for 2. There was a Putrid Leech pump involved in me taking control of the game that I might have been able to do without, so I'm kicking myself a bit.

Game 3 goes accordingly to play - land (but not too much), removal, and cascade spells for card advantage. I finally win my first round since the second. :/

3-4 (9-9)

Round 8 vs AthosTheMusketeer

An honest to goodness Jund Hackblade deck. I was starting to think they'd gone extinct, but here one is - Borderposts, Bloodhall Oozes, and all. Of course, before I knew that I had decided to mulligan a 2 land, 5 spell draw where the lands were a forest and an Exotic Orchard. No Trace so I pretty much need my opponent to give me red and especially black mana or that draw is garbage. Maybe there's enough Jund in the field that I should keep it, but I didn't. My six card hand includes a Savage Lands and a forest, which is much better, but I don't have a third mana until turn 4 and that pretty much sinks me versus Hackblades.

Game 2 I pretty quickly establish control of the ground, but he's got a pair of Hell's Thunders that get through for 12 damage and a removal spell, but it's not enough. This is pretty much the deck my deck was designed to beat.

Game 3 I draw Sledge and Uril. He lines up a bunch of blockers in front of it, knowing that he loses to any removal spell but forced to hope against hope. I Purge his Leech and the blowout is on.

4-4 (11-10)

Round 9 vs ... no one

I decided to keep the Forest, Orchard, 5 spell hand this time, but my opponent never showed up. 10 minutes later he timed out and I got a free win.

5-4 (13-10)

     The Wrap

All in all I think I got a bit unlucky along the way to only go 5-4 (missing top 64 and 3 booster packs on tiebrekaers), but I also don't think I had the right decklist. I anticipated a field full of Hackblades, but instead got a field of anti-Hackblade decks like my own. If I'd shown up packing answers to untargetable creatures I would have done a lot better, I think. It's also possible that an entirely different archetype (anti-anti-hackblade, whatever that is (maybe we'll find out when the Top 8 decklists are posted)) would have been the better call.

Le Havre

Randy Buehler — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:01:00 GMT

So after reading multiple recommendations in comments on this blog, I purchased and played Le Havre this week. It seems good, but why do you guys think it's a better board game than Agricola?

I'm happy to own it and I look forward to playing it more, but it doesn't look like it's going to have nearly the replay value of Agricola. Without much randomness to either the set-up or the gameplay, what stops it from bogging down into one reasonably-solved puzzle after the first couple of games? With Agricola (which is by the same designer), I find that your random hand of Minor Improvements and Occupations does a lot to make each game that you play a pretty different experience. All those cards can make Agricola feel a little bit busy, but it's not like Le Havre constrains your actions down to a small number of options. If anything, the late turns of Le Havre seem to present you with even more options that you can potentially spend your turn doing. Plus it's almost twice as long to play (so far in limited smaple size, anyway).

Anyway, like I said, I'm not complaining; but I would enjoy hearing more from someone who loves Le Havre. I'm probably missing something.

New Job(s)!

Randy Buehler — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:08:00 GMT

All of a sudden I've gone from having no job to having two! They're both part-time, and they're connected to each other, but they're also pretty distinct and the combination adds up to a really good situation that makes me pretty happy. I will explain in more detail but, as anyone who knows me well would expect, I want to start with the big-picture context. I believe I have stitched together a nearly ideal situation for myself for at least the short-term, but it's a bit difficult to explain ...

I said in my initial Job Status Update that I see myself as a potential start-up CEO in the digital gaming space, but that I wasn't sure I knew enough about the technology side of things to execute successfully even if I did manage to get a project or a company funded. Ideally what I need to find is some partner that knows the programming side of things cold. In the absence of that I've been looking for executive-level jobs at established companies with any eye toward learning more and meeting more people.

Multiple friends have encouraged me to just skip that step and cut straight to the more entrepreneurial portion of my career and I needed something other than my job search to pour my energy into anyway, so I have in fact put together a start-up: Mind Twist Games. Mind Twist is a collaboration between myself, Richard Garfield, and Skaff Elias and under this banner I have been attempting to put together funding and a development plan for an online game project that Richard has designed.

I quickly realized that the folks I knew at Mind Control Software would be ideal developers for the project. If you've played their game Oasis then you can probably guess that they are kindred spirits - true Thinking Gamers. They've also been (wisely imo) hiring several Wizards Digital alumni (including Andrew Finch and, recently, Alan Comer). Anyway, they were indeed quite interested in working together and in fact at this point we have decided that instead of me trying to get Mind Twist up and running so that I can then hire them to code this project, we're better off joining forces and working together to get the project funded as part of an expansion of Mind Control.

So that means I'm now officially playing the start-up lottery, pitching venture capitalists on behalf of Mind Control Software in an effort to get the money required to bring Richard's latest game design vision to life.

Meanwhile, Mind Control is in need of additional business development resources to help out with their existing business (they are a 20-30 person development studio that's been around for over a decade) and I'm certainly not opposed to the idea of collecting a paycheck between now and the time that Richard's game is up and running and successful and making money. So I have agreed to join Mind Control as a part-time Director of Business Development. This way I have enough work and enough income that my own personal finances won't be marching backwards while I get to spend a big chunk of my time trying to build something from scratch. Like I said at the top, it seems like a pretty ideal scenario for me: I get to have the fun of a start-up project while also having sufficient financial security not to live and die with it. Plus along the way I get to watch a rock-solid engineering culture function and see how much I can help them accomplish.

Anyway, I guess the short version of that is that a) I've joined Mind Control Games as a part-time Director of Business Development, b) I'm also starting up a pretty cool online game project with Richard Garfield, and c) There are several different ways that these two part-time jobs might merge in the future. However this plays out, it should be a lot of fun!

Game Recommendations

Randy Buehler — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Lots of people have recommended lots of games to the comments on my blog. I've tried out a bunch of them and I thought i would share my impressions:

iPhone

Drop7 has become my go-to app whenever I have a few minutes of downtime. It's an insidious combination of Tetris and Sudoku with a little bit of Minesweeper thrown in. The idea is to drop discs onto the board such that you blow up other discs and keep the screen clean. meanwhile new tiles march up from the bottom to make your life difficult. The luck of the draw can make some positions a little frustrating, but then again if it wasn't for the randomness the game wouldn't be nearly as fun. Yesterday it also hooked Del, and I lost the use of my phone for most of the afternoon. Anyway, I highly recommend it. Very skill-testing and very much a thinking game. There's a Lite version that will show you the basic gameplay, but if you like it I do think you'll want to pony up the couple of bucks for the full version as you get better formats plus really good high score tracking.

Reiner Knizia's Poison and Reiner Knizia's Knights of Charlemagne. Reiner Knizia is one of the most famous and prolific German board game designers. Of his games, I have personally enjoyed Ra, Medici, Amun Re, Tigris and Euphrates, and Lost Cities plus I see that he finally won the prestigious Spiel des Jahre last year for Keltis (which I have not played). Anyway, I love the idea of his games coming to iPhone, though I'm not sure I'm specifically in love with these two games.

Knights of Charlemagne is a well-executed port of a fairly light 1995 game where you play out cards and try to have the most points on enough tiles to win the game. It's reminiscent to me of Lost Cities and even more so of Pecking Order (a Richard Garfield design) where you and your opponent have the same basic resources and are just trying to use them more efficiently. I find these games a little too calculational for my tastes (I enjoy strategy more than tactics), but even if I'm not going to keep playing it for hours and hours I have no regrets about spending a couple of bucks on a game app that I'll play 10-20 times and then put away. The app includes an AI that you play against in a 2-player game and also a hot-seat mode, which I doubt gets much use since if you and your friend were together then why would you choose to play an iPhone game? The tabletop version is alleged on Board Game Geek to be best with 3-players, but I bet that would be pretty hard to program a good interface for.

Poison is another port of a fairly light, fairly math-y tabletop game. This time you're trying not to capture points but if your card sends the cauldron over 13 then you have to take all the cards in the cauldron. The app is well done and I think I like it better than Knights of Charlemagne. If I hadn't found Drop7, I would probably still be playing this regularly as I don't feel like I understand the strategies very well yet and the AI is still beating me consistently.

Flight Control seems very good for someone other than me. The idea is that you're an air traffic controller and you have to draw flight paths for incoming aircraft such that they all land without crashing into each other. It's fun and I can see how it would hook people, but for me I quickly grow tired of realizing that my fingers aren't as fast or as accurate as my brain wants them to be.

Funny ... I was going to try out a few more recommendations as I wrote this, but Del has once again appropriated my phone to play Drop7. My queue has Totomi and iScopa at the top, for whatever that's worth. Meanwhile, here's a useful link with some other iPhone game recommendations, most of which i haven't gotten around to yet.

Finally, a plug: My friends Alan Comer and Nate Heiss put a breakout variant together called Fireball, Block Destroyer that just arrived at the app store. It's worth checking out if you get anything resembling enjoyment from breakout games. Alan just accepted a job at Mind Control Games so I suspect his days of messing around with iPhone app's are numbered, but I know they had fun while it lasted.

Board Games

Multiple people have recommend Le Havre, which is the next game done by the designer of Agricola (Uwe Rosenberg). I haven't tracked down a copy yet, but I think I'll try to do that this afternoon so I can take it to Wizards for Tuesday night board games. Most of my board gaming this past month has been Through The Ages, which I continue to enjoy. I now think it plays best with 3 players, by the way. 4 has some additionally interesting dynamics, but I don't think they're worth extending the game length from 4.5 hours to 6.

XBox 360

I haven't played much XBox at all, lately. I suspect that the next game I dive into will be Duels of the Planeswalkers, aka Magic for XBLA. It cleared the Microsoft certification process last week so it shouldn't be too much longer now. I have seen enough of it to know that it's well polished, though I admit I haven't played enough to know how challenging it will be for long-time Magic players.

PC/Web games

Most of my gaming on this platform has been done on Magic Online. I've got 16 QP's and counting, so I'm qualified for the monthly championship and if i rack up 9 more points then I get a first round bye. If anybody has any Alara block constructed tech that they want to share the week before Pro Tour Honolulu, feel free to drop me a line.

I did also try Within a Deep Forest, a free game by Nifflas. It's a platformer with a really good physics engine where you play a bouncing ball. Well above average for a free web game, but at the end of the day too much of a dexterity game to hold my attention for long. If you like platformers with some additional thinking required, though, it's well worth checking out.

Has anybody tried out PopCap's new Plants Versus Zombies game yet? Peggle was awesome and despite the casual-looking skin I feel no shame in having played the hell out of it. It was quite deep and superbly well executed (the Ode to Joy as the Extreme Fever theme music in particular really shows you what you can do with sound to enhance gameplay). Having enjoyed Peggle as a sort of thinking game in disguise, I'm very curious to see PopCap's take on the tower defense genre. They seem to have an almost Blizzard-like willingness to make sure they get the gameplay right. Anyway, would love to hear from folks who've played it.

That's the rundown for me. What else is out there that we thinking gamers should be playing, if only we knew about it?

Pseudo Vacation

Randy Buehler — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:46:00 GMT

Kira and Del have gone off to Disneyland for a 5-day long mother-daughter vacation. This means I'm essentially a bachelor this week. I've been in job search mode pretty much non-stop since New Years so I decided that I too would go on vacation this week. So far I'm pretty happy with how I've spent my time ... here's the run-down:

Monday: I took Del and Kira to the airport in the morning and then headed to the grocery store to lay in a supply of frozen food and Diet Coke. I then proceeded to play Magic Online for 18 consecutive hours, something I have never come close to doing before. Hell, I haven't played that much Magic in a row since my pro player days in the late 90's before I joined Wizards, and that was long before MTGO came out. I started at about 1 in the afternoon and finally crashed around 7am. In between I got top 4 in one Daily Event, top 16 in another, won 2 or 3 drafts, and placed or showed in several others.

I figured I would spend this week seeing if I could get myself qualified for the Magic Online Championship Series (MOCS). It's essentially the same sort of "free roll" tournament system that poker has perfected over the years: if you play enough then you get invited to a special free tournament at the end of the season. In MOCS, you get 1 Qualifiying Point (QP) for winning a queue (aka single-elim. 8-person tournament) and you get 3 QP's for making top 8 of a Daily Event (swiss paired tournaments with typical sizes of 24-64 people). Accumulate 15 QP's over the course of the month and you're invited to the monthly championship. Win one of the 7 monthly championship (the first of which had 354 runners) and you get invited to the (paper) World Championships in Rome and in addition to competing in Worlds you're also in an 8-man MTG) grand finale for $50 grand. I'm actually not eligible to play in real-world Magic events because my wife works for Wizards, but Magic Online is not actually DCI-sanctioned and I'm a sucker for tournaments, esp with lots of context.

At this point it seems likely I'll qualify and I guess if I do manage to win the monthly championship then the runner-up will get a very happy surprise. I don't like my chances all that much since the finals is constructed and I have neither a team nor a collection full of Planeswalkers, but it will be fun to try. Playing full Alara block constructed about 2 weeks after it goes on sale seems like it could be beating for everyone involved. It will seque nicely into Pro Tour Honolulu, though, which I will be attending as part of the coverage team, including the live webcast.

Tuesday: I set my alarm for 3:15 in the afternoon, something I don't think I've done since college. Tuesday is board game night at Wizards plus I had a meeting set up before hand. Before games, though, I was looking forward to debating the merits of the new Star Trek movie with Aaron Forsythe for a few minutes. Aaron is annoyed by old-and-busted Spock appearing in what Aaron was hoping would be a completely new beginning point that would allow him (a non-Trekkie) to jump in and not have to worry about what might or might not have happened before. Basically, he wanted a reboot a la Bond or Batman. In my opinion the actual reboot that Trek has done is significantly *better* because Star Trek has always been about the characters and by changing the world they now give themselves the ability to have characters make different choices.

Look, I already know how the Joker story is going to turn out. Sure it was awesome to see Heath Ledger's take on that character, but it's still essentially the same story it was with Jack Nicholson and I already know how it ends. With this new Trek, though, things are much more open-ended. Quinto-Spock seems like he's going to emphasis his human side way more than Nimoy-Spock (the death of his mom provides new and different motivations, plus he's an endangered species now and needs to breed ... and that looks likely to involve Uhura, which feels totally natural despite being a pretty different story from the one gene Roddenberry told with these characters). Anyway, they needed to reboot more than just the actors and the tech. They needed to re-boot a storyline that had become bloated under the weight of its own continuity and that's precisely what they did. By not settling for a Bond/Batman-style reboot, but instead going the extra mile to both placate Trekkie continuity hounds and also provide the characters with new motivations that set up interestingly different arcs, this movie really blew me away. That's more that enough goodness to allow me to forgive a little bit of lazy writing (I'm looking at you, Ice cave scene).

Anyway, I'm not sure Aaron agrees, but it's not like he hated the movie. He just gave it a mere 'B' and felt obliged to defend himself. i got pulled away because it was time for Agricola. I played maybe my best game of Agricola ever and scored 54 in a 3-player game to win via blow-out. We then played Turbo Hearts over dinner at Cheesecake Factory (during which I also got to hear Kira singing "It's a Small World" several times over the phone ... 30 years later and that song is still insidiously catchy. Somewhere my parents are laughing at me right now.) I never got majorly boofed in the hearts game, but i still managed to lose like 200 points anyway. After dinner there were 5 left who still wanted to play Hearts and I lost the draw so i decided to head home and play more MTGO.

I proceeded to finish 2nd in 3 of the 4 drafts I could get in before things went into No-Pay mode at 5am in anticipation of the weekly downtime (scrubbing out in the first round of the other). A pretty reasonable result in terms of accumulating cards and packs so I can keep playing, but 2nd place isn't worth any QP's. I'm also pretty frustrated with the inconsistent mana that's inherent to Alara block. Even if you first-pick tri-lands and land-cyclers, you're still rolling the dice and more games are decided by mana issues on one side or the other than I like to see so I find myself playing a lot of Tempest-Stronghold draft and Shadowmoor-Eventide draft. SSE with all its hybrid and the very real possibility of drafting mono-color decks allows for by far the best mana of any limited format ever, but Alara fires so much more frequently that I find myself running it a lot rather than waiting around.

Wednesday: I went to bed around 6-7am but took my iPhone into the bedroom rather than leaving it synched to my computer like I normally do. I figured I might get a call about the one career opportunity I'm still actively pursuing this week despite trying to mostly just goof off and/or I might get a call about some random gaming opportunity. Around 11am my phone rang and its Rob Watkins. Did I want to drive to Alan Comer's house for a game of Through the Ages? Sure ... that sounds like fun. On the way there Mike Turian calls and wants to game after work too. I had been thinking about playing a poker tournament with Henry Stern (who was out 4th for TTA), but board gaming is more fun so Henry, Mike, and I wind up playing TTA at Mike's house instead. This is actually the second time in the last couple weeks that I've managed to play two games of TTA on the same day. This time, however, I did a lot less winning. In the first game I sacrificed my army to win what I hoped would be a decisive culture war, but there was actually way too much game left for that play. I got attacked 5 times on the last 2+ orbits around the table and wound up a distant 3rd. In the second game I did a bunch of little things wrong, the most egregious of which was probably not going to Theocracy with it's 2 extra military actions as soon as Caeser died. Anyway 11 hours, 2 meals, and 2 Henry Stern victories later I was headed home. I managed to win an Alara draft while flipping back and forth and writing this entry so now seems like a great time to call in a night.

Poker Thoughts

Randy Buehler — Sat, 02 May 2009 09:18:00 GMT

I play a very important role in the poker ecosystem. I'm good enough to win at the local level, gathering up thousands of dollars which I then lose to real poker players on my periodic trips to big tournaments. I've never gone back through my yearly spreadsheets to do this calculation, but I think I am down lifetime despite being up at least 20 grand when I play within 20 miles of my house. I won the Washington State No-Limit Hold 'Em championship one year, but I have failed to cash in either of my 2 World Poker Tour events. I win way more than my fair share of the Sunday morning tournaments at Diamond Lil's, but the only cash I've won in World Series bracelet events is $1000 from a save when I was heads-up at the first table of a shoot-out event. Last year I got a nice bonus from work so I treated myself to a seat in the Main Event, but I only lasted 5 hands because my pocket aces got cracked by pocket sixes and I accidentally got myself pot-stuck before I could figure it out.

Malcolm Gladwell's latest book (which is quite good) is called Outliers and in it he offers up the theory that to be truly good at something, you need to put in 10,000 hours to learn it. While there are certainly some elements of luck and raw skill required for success, he's pretty squarely on the nurture / hard-work side of the spectrum and he defends his position well (better than the mediocre logic of Blink and esp. Tipping Point, anyway). I have not played 10,000 hours of poker and I'm not sure I want to. I do think I have the raw skills required to be at least good and maybe even very good at the game. However, I get bored by endless cash games and I also get frustrated by the high amount of variance in poker. In Magic, good players have a bigger edge over bad ones. I think the randomness, and thus the balance between skill and luck, is dialed in to a perfect spot and that's why to this day I still think Magic is the best strategy game in the world. You can't win as much money at Magic as you can at poker, but if we all got together and wanted to crown the King Thinking Gamer, we wouldn't play Hold Em ... we'd draft.

Anyway, I play poker probably once or twice a month and usually in tournaments of some kind. The extra structure and the inevitable crowning of one winner appeals to my competitive side way more than trying to eke out a few more big blinds. Between watching this season of High Stakes poker and following Dave Williams on Twitter, I've started eyeing this years WSOP schedule. They've got a $1,000 "Stimulus Special" scheduled for the first weekend (May 30-June 2) that should draw like 5000 people. I'm certainly not going to play the Main Event in my current unemployed condition, but $1,000 is much more manageable (also known as win-able locally). Tonight did not help matters, though. I played some $2 / $5 No Limit at the new Snowqualmie casino and I correctly identified and picked off the action player's all-in semi-bluff on the flop. However, his flush got there on the river to win the $700 pot and I ended the night down about that much. I try to tell myself that all I can control is whether I make good decisions, but it's tough emotionally when I also know I simply don't play enough hands to actually get to the long run.

I do watch a fair amount of poker on TV, which I find to be a more compelling, more gamer-friendly version of reality TV. It's got a recurring cast of characters and it's got interesting conflicts between them. Add in the rooting interest and the smug feeling of superiority that comes from always being able to see everyone's hole cards and that's enough to make it onto my DVR. I stopped watching the World Poker Tour once the final tables started filling up with almost entirely random players, but I find High Stakes Poker to be must-see TV. Tom Dwan has been extremely impressive this season. This hand in particular is worth 5 minutes if you enjoy poker at all. Not only does he win the hand, but he also wins a side-bet on which of his opponents actually had the best hand! In a later show he gets Greenstein to go all-in as a 3 to 1 dog. Greenstein sucks out to win over $500k, but Dwan just shrugs it off, rebuys, and later takes a $900,000 pot off of Greenstein.

Ok, I think I'm done steaming. Time to go to bed now ...

More Gaming

Randy Buehler — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:41:00 GMT

Well it looks like Fallout 3 is officially not going to hook me. After two more sessions I feel like I understand it a lot better now. It's bleak and you have to conserve ammunition and combat is hard and it's a constant struggle to avoid death and I'm reminded of a story that Chris Pikula tells about teaching his girlfriend (now wife) how to play Magic: They played for a while and she was struggling a bit but then there was this dawning realization in her eyes and she says "OHH, so I compare the numbers on my creatures to the numbers on theirs and I have to figure out how my opponent would block so know whether I should attack or not?" Chris shouts "Yes!" And Kerry says "Why would I want to spend my time doing that?"

Fallout doesn't seem to present any interesting mental challenges for me, it just seems like a grind where you have to not mess up any of the details. At some level I have to admire the way in which their desolate post-apocalyptic flavor has permeated even their game mechanics, and I'm sure if I played a ton of these big open-ended single-player RPG's then I'd probably find this one to be a refreshing challenge. But I don't ... and I don't.

So now I have nothing queued up to play on my XBox 360. I'd love to hear suggestions - what do you guys think I would like?

Meanwhile, I realized after my last blog entry that I left out a platform that I've been doing a fair amount of gaming on:

iPhone

WordFu - This is basically a well-polished Boggle variant. (All of the ngmoco stuff I have seen seems pretty well polished, by the way.) I'm not a huge word-game guy, but between the sound effects, the power-ups, and the achievement system I am definitely enjoying this one. It's also got the distinction of being the only iPhone game that my wife Del has borrowed my phone in order to play.

iShoot - I first encountered this game by reading stories about how the developer made enough money off of it to quit his day job and do iPhone app's full time. Then I played it, saw how decidedly mediocre it is, and began to think that maybe it was easier to make money off of iPhone games than I realized. The idea is that you spend money on weapons, shoot opponents one turn at a time (where you control aiming), and earn more money for bigger weapons. It's not awful if you like that kind of gameplay, but it wasn't exciting either.

Galcon - I want to like this a lot, but in fact I only like it medium. It's a cute little real-time strategy game and it's absolutely worth downloading the Galcon Lite because the first half-dozen times you play are very very good. It starts to lose its appeal after you have figured out how things work, but I highly recommend trying out the free version because they've chosen to put pretty much that entire initial experience into it. My issue with the game after the first hour is that it becomes a twitch a game once you sort through the basic mechanics. Playign a twitch game versus a computer AI isn't my cup of tea ...

Cuberunner - The idea is that you fly around for as long as possible while dodging the randomly generated cubes. Very simple, but pretty fun and the price is right (free).

Monsters versus Aliens - Those of you with young kids might consider this. It has now replaced Lightsaber Unleashed and watching "Move It, Move It" from Madagascar over and over again as my 4-year old daughter Kira's favorite thing to do on my phone. She gets to poke B.O.B., sort cards, and play random sound effects. (Their website has a decent Monster Builder, by the way, where once again by "decent" I mean "entertaining for a 4-7 year old."

TCGBuddy - The best Magic life tracker app I am aware of. Definitely worth a couple of bucks if you play any TCG irl.

PuzzleQuest - Great game. It's "just" a port of a game that's been around for a couple years on pretty much every platform, but if you haven't already played this then I highly recommend it. On the one hand, it's a really good game. (Basically take Bejeweled, add a spell system, add a number of ways to level-up your avatar between games, then add in an RPG-style plot arch. It probably sounds strange if you don't already know this title, but it totally works. Suddenly the basic match-3 mechanic changes from idle diversion into strategy game that must be beaten.) On the other hand, it lends itself really well to the iPhone because you can easily play it in 5-minute bursts, picking it up and putting it down as convenient. This is the game I have spent the most time on since I got my iPhone in December.

Fieldrunners - Another great game. This is the game I have sent by far the most time on in the last month. On some level it's "just" a tower defense game, but it's well polished, well balanced, and Tower Defense games speak directly to what I want from a game, especially the ones where you get to build your own map (a mechanic this one shares in common with Desktop Tower Defense).

Of course, the biggest flaw with the iPhone app store is finding stuff. Given that my tastes aren't the most mainstream in the world, I don't really know how I'm supposed to find games that I will like. Hopefully some of these suggestions are useful to you and you can reciprocate by telling me what you've found. All I've got left in Fieldrunners is to beat it on hard and PuzzleQuest bogs down a little bit in the late game, so I'm hoping to find something new soon. Anyone?