So when I heard about troll in the corner’s giveaway I spread the word to my buddies in my gaming group and started rolling away on my lucky dice until I rolled out all of the 1s (not really, but I could have!).

So if you haven’t heard of Pathfinder yet, it’s sorta like D&D 3.75. And the contestis a great way to explore some new worlds. There seems to be a ton of modules out for Pathfinder already and Paizo doesn’t have the same stigma to me as Hasbro/WotC does.

I wonder if I’ll be able to convert my 3.5 campaign into Pathfinder. Actually, it’s probably better to keep it as 3.5 since one of the guys haven’t role played before. But if Pathfinder holds up to backwards compatible, then someone of the stuff may be forwards compatible. And it would be neat to integrate some of the things I’ve been reading about.

Now Peel Deals are quite the interesting food. It takes a handful of things that are all good on their own. (Hot Dogs, Bread, Cheese) jams them together in a foil, and let’s the heat melt it all together. Part of the Deal is that you need to Peel away the foil to get to your food. One might ask “Is that where the name came from?” And I would tell you “Sure!” cause seriously, I didn’t even know the name until a few days ago.

I can almost hear you, dear blog reader, salivating from behind your monitors. Well, while I have your attention let’s settle one thing immediately. I haven’t had one of these in probably 15-20 years, and I never knew the name of it when I did. So why is this now becoming such a hot topic? Well, to be forthright, I have no idea. But alas, enough with the delays. Let’s get on to the recipe.

Now let me preface this whole thing with something. I will not supply any other recipes that suggest putting Ketchup on your Hot Dogs. Once you are old enough to know better, mustard is the condiment to put on dogs.

Ingredients:
Hot Dogs, American Cheese, Bread, Condiment of Choice (Ketchup or Mustard)
1. Boil the Hot dogs.
2. Butterfly the Hot Dog and place the cheese in the middle.
3. Place on bread, applying Condiment between dog and Bread.
4. Roll up in the bread, and place in Aluminum Foil.

The heat of the dogs should melt the cheese into the bread and create a Deal of a mess that you have to Peel from the foil.

So if you were up for a blast from the past, check out the Peel Deals. I’ll try to confirm if the recipe is right, but from what I understand it’s correct. Well, there ya go. Enjoy the Peel Deals, and maybe they’ll make a storming come back as Organic Peel Deals. I can just picture it now, Tofu Dogs, Low-Fat Cheddar, and some type of Healthy Whole wheat bread.

In quick defense of the game that I wasted many many hours in (Risk) even though there is this type of feedback, a lot of cases its the player’s fault if they don’t target the person who is in the lead. Sure sometimes it’s impossible to stop (like cashing in cards) but with average dice, there can be enough player interaction to take the leader down a peg or two. It may take a little time to crown a victor, but that time is spent jockeying for position. In monopoly, interaction is limited (at best) and that time is spent watching the richest person rack up positive cash each loop around the board. And likely, the $200 bonus from passing go isn’t enough for the losing players to make up the difference.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an internet post floating around about the shortest possible game of Monopoly. While I applaud the players for attempting to play the Shortest game possible. But there’s one major problem, that’s a problem with most Monopoly games. They don’t play by the rules. Now there’s a major difference between saying Monopoly’s Shortest game, and Monopoly’s Shortest game with our own house rules. I know that few people actually play the auctioning rules, but they speed up the game dramatically. This shortest game obviously isn’t using them. Luckily they don’t play with any other house rules, (or if they are the game is too short to focus on them) but as an amateur game designer, a lot of time is spent tweaking balance in a game. Now you might not like the idea of auctioning, or think it might be too complex for the kids to play, but the problem is: once you’ve played a handful of games without those rules, you’ll never play the actual rules.

There are a few comments about auctioning, but the original poster just claims they both decline to bid anything. The original rules stated that a property must be sold to the highest bidder in an auction. In fact, no auctioning occurs in their game which speeds up the movement, but also is unrealistic. Noone actually says “i’m not going to bid” and they just run through the game as if it’s assumed. Hell, if someone said I’m not going to bid, I’d bid a $1 just to get cheap property.

Hell don’t get me wrong. I don’t have that much against adding rules to speed up a game or make things more interesting. But the auction rules aren’t being played, and people never read the rules to realize they are missing anything. How else can we get word out? When I was much younger, we used to play a variant of Rummy 500 with all types of crazy rules. Instead of drawing 13 cards to be able to play everything we allowed more matches to go through. Just a few that I can remember off the top of my head are: crosswords (reusing a card for both a run and a triple), cousins (runs of the same color), around the corner (K-A-2 run). This sped up the game, and allowed some fun rulings.

Hell we used to play 7 card stud with crazy wildcards. Winning with a pair was boring, but winning with a straight flush! That was something. We used the baseball or the woolworth wild rules. Baseball, 3′s and 9′s were wild and 4′s were an extra card. Woolworth 5′s and 10′s were wild, and 6′s were an extra card. Basball makes sense: strikes and innings are wilds, a walk is an extra card. With Woolworth, everything in the store was 5 cents or 10 cents (maybe when my parents were growing up) but I have no idea where the 6 came in. Looking online, it doesn’t seem like anyone actually used this extra card for Woolworth so I wouldn’t be surprised if we just made that up. Possibly, 6 represented the Sales Tax in New Jersey. Although from a game flavor standpoint, giving you an extra card for tax doesn’t make sense.

So anyway, Monopoly sucks and you shouldn’t play it. If the best game you are playing is Monopoly, try switching over to family friendly games like Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan.

So the first place I found out about was right near my middle school in Bloomfield, NJ, which I happened to be attending when I started playing Magic. This place was called Brittany Sportscard. (Everyone just called it Brittany’s which was the name of the owner’s daughter IIRC) So this place was your traditional Sports Memorabilia/Comic Shop/Trading Card shop. The store was pretty long so the Comics were all along the one wall. And then he had I guess more expensive stuff under glass. So whatever signed baseballs he was selling, or whatnot. He had some single Magic cads there, and I’m guessing single Sports cards too. They kept all the boosters on the opposite wall of the comics. So the glass things would separate the customers out, and then the guys working would have to turn behind them to get the boosters or starters.

Now for whatever reason Brittany’s always had packs of older cards. This is 95/96-ish and you would expect them to just have like only the most recent expansions like Ice Age and Alliances and 4th Edition or whatever. But they seemed to have a bunch of Revised/Dark/Legends lying around too. I don’t know if they just had a huge stock of them or what. The other thing about Brittany’s is their pack prices was always pretty expensive. The cheapest cards would be the list price on the pack. I know they are a business, and I usually bought there when I first started playing, but it started to wear a little bit that prices were as expensive as they were. Especially after we found our second playing ground, Comic World, had much cheaper prices.

The best thing about Brittany’s was they had a Type 1 tournament every month. The first Saturday (I think) of each month at around 7 all of the local Magic geeks would come together and Brittany’s would open up their basement and crowd everyone downstairs amongst the setup tables and extra inventory. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think anyone actually had the Power Nine. But it was nice to not be too restricted with what you could play. If we were playing Type 2 (which was in it’s infancy) I wouldn’t have see all the random old cool cards (like the Green Serendib Efreet or Braingeyser or …). It also seemed like all the guys who were playing when I started had tons of Dual lands, and had pretty big firepower. So for 5 bucks you got entry into the tournament, a slice of pizza, and a can of soda. Winner and 2nd place got some prize booster support. I recall at some point they started giving a random pack to someone. But for the cost of $5 you basically got dinner and a place to play cards for 5 hours. Once you got knocked from the tournament they just asked that you stay out of the way of people still in the tournament, but as much trading/casual play as you could fit in was expected. Oh and if you happened to buy a bunch of cards while you were there from the store all the better.

I don’t remember who I played in my first Brittany’s tournament, but I remember having like a 5 color 80 card deck. After getting destroyed pretty quickly in the first game to my opponent I chatted with him for a bit and decided I was going to remove all of my red cards from my deck (obviously it was Red that was the problem since I didn’t draw any mountains) and didn’t fair much better in game two. Yes, I realized later it was completely illegal for me to do this, but this was more casual. The guy was nice enough to trim my 80 card 5 color deck down to 60ish cards, and only 2 or 3 colors. I’m sure he traded stuff with me, and I probably lost a pretty good rare for some Timmy rare. But the new deck seemed pretty decent.

Sometime early on I ended up swapping cards accidentally with one of the regulars. A long-haired metal dude named Shaun (I think that’s the right spelling, I never knew his last name). Swapping cards wasn’t exactly what happened though, he ended up with some multi-colored beads that I used for counters, and I ended up with his Red/Black land destruction deck. This was still early on for me, and I felt bad about losing my beads, but thought it a great learning experience. I played his deck against my own, and learned how the deck worked. It was like taking apart a computer built by one of the better builders in the local scene. The deck was pretty ruthless if it could get going. 4 Sinkholes, 4 Blights, 4 Strip Mines, 4 Stone Rain, 4 Sedge Trolls, 3 Demonic Hordes, 3 Icy Manipulators, 4 Badlands. Something like that. It just tried to bludgeon you into having no resources. We successfully swapped back at the next tournament and he was quite relieved to get back his prized possession.

I don’t know exactly how long it took but I know by the next year I had become a dominant force on the scene. I had built a UW Stasis deck that deck could almost play itself. I would counter big threats, sit there and not do all that much. Then lock down the board and coast to victory. I used Kismet, Storm Cauldron, Capsize, Chronatog, Enlightened Tutor, Ivory Tower, Black Vise, and some creature kill. I could probably rebuild the deck off the top of my head. With a Kismet/Stasis lock in play, I would just stall long enough until I drew the 3rd puzzle piece. To be honest, the deck wasn’t that fun to play, because it was racing my opponent to the lock, and it definitely wasn’t fun to play against. I think I only lost a few matches with the deck fully built. And one of the losses in the semifinals, I had my opponent completely locked out, each of us had a Zuran Orb out and he sacrificed some land to have more life than I did just before they called time. Brittany’s had a policy to not give extra time and since they did a bracket style tournament instead of Swiss, they awarded my opponent the victory. A poor way to end a game, they should at least have let me get the chance to sacrifice lands myself. Oh well, I have long memories but try not to hold any grudges. My opponent was gracious enough to give me a card from one of his packs for getting second place. I was still convinced I would have gotten first, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

The tournaments had started getting erratic around this time, and wasn’t a guarantee to happen each month anymore. But the next tournament my Stasis deck had been dismantled and most of the pieces were sitting in my trade binder. I built a new Silver Bullet style deck that would haunt my opponents. Between all the creature recursion, always having an answer, and having the finisher in my back pocket, my Hermit Misery deck won with as much consistency as the Stasis deck but with a higher fun factor for myself and my opponents.

It always felt so weird to not know if they were having their tourney that month or not. They definitely should have had a better system. This was before the internet was so widespread, but they required word of mouth and it just didn’t work that well. A lot of the regulars started getting out of the game, and with less new blood coming in and less regular tournaments the lot of us changed primary scenes to Comic World.

Brittany’s had another location near the high school, which was actually their first location. And as almost a final hurrah, after the store I knew about closed down they had one last Type 1 tourney at the other location. It was fun to play another Brittany’s tournament, so I decided to bring a fun green Land destruction deck that was Type 2 legal. I added a few Type 1 staples (like Regrowth) and went to the tournament with a bit of a handicap. I think that was the last tourney Brittany had. I wish I had kept some type of record of the deck I brought to each event and how well I fared.

I know those Brittany tourneys had been feeding me with lots of extra boosters. So here’s a toast to Brittany’s. Thanks for all the great hours. I don’t know exactly when you went under, but I loved spending hours in your basement playing cards. And thanks for everyone else for the good competition. I wonder if any of you still play or would be up for some casual games.

I occasionally talk to a handful of people that I was playing the game with back in my teenage years, but there are just as many who I don’t know last names of or I don’t have any way to contact them. I’ve attempted to search for the people a bit online, and tried finding info about the places but there appears to be absolutely nothing on the internet about them. Since I have a little bit of sway with the search engines, hopefully if anyone else out there is looking for the same things I’ve been looking for they will find me. Not to say I think people are looking for me, sometimes it’s fun to remember the past through a different pair of eyes and a different memory.

So I guess this will be a bit of a remembrance post much akin to my other post. But this will be more about my in person playing and dealings.

The first time I saw Magic was at Chess School (mock all you like I did goto Chess school). A bunch of the “I’m getting too cool for this” kids brought their cards in and hid off to the second room. The teacher (Arkady Geller) had lots of kids to deal with so didn’t have enough time to watch everyone, and since we were the older kids we were supposed to be playing against each other. Well, this must have been like 1994 or so, and these two kids brought in and were playing Magic. I recalled once I started playing a year or two later that these kids weren’t playing right at all. They had two stacks of decks. One of land and one of spells. I guess it was their way to prevent mana screw. I remember getting a Rulebook (it must have been a Revised one) and scouring through it. But it took a bit longer for me to actually start collecting.

My dad tells me that he was trying to find a way to get me to read more. I had already showed an inclination for Computers, but also Fantasy. So he bought me a Starter pack and a Booster pack of Ice Age. He was basically creating a reward system for me, read a few chapters and tell me about them. And I’ll get you some cards. I’m still not sure how exactly he stumbled upon it, but the idea was a goldmine. He said he just happened to see the cards in a 7-11, but I don’t know what made him think to go for it.

Anyway, so that’s how I got started playing. My Chess playing took a downturn after middle school. I wasn’t going to Chess School anymore so my game playing fueled into Magic. At the time I didn’t know it was going to be one of my most social aspects for the next 6 years. Alright I was intending this post to actually be about the locals, but it turned into something else. I’ll write another one actually about spending Saturday nights playing cards and eating pizza in the basement of a card/comic shop.

In the two player version, I believe there will always be a loser. However, I think it might be possible for both players to lose if they screw up badly enough. I’m not certain how a three player variant would work, since it might unbalance the game. Classic ganging up syndrome at all. I won’t get too far ahead of myself, because for the first iteration this will only be a two player game, and since the map I drew doesn’t really contain much besides Greenland, Iceland, UK, Denmark. It would be tough to fit another player in all that. Once I have the play system down we’ll see what direction things take. So now I have a partial board, although I know I will want to have some piece movement (not based on dice rolls), so I will need to divvy up the board into “squares” and I also know I need a bunch of cards. So I’m gonna just design like a dozen cards or so, and leave the rest as filler. Hopefully with what I have in place, and a taking advantage of the whiteboard to fix any of squares that seem wrong, I can play a very early round of Greenland within a few hours of work. Hopefully.

And big props to Pelle Nilsson for the Inkscape Board Game Extension. I haven’t played around with it that much, but having something that will generate uniform cards will be much handier than writing things on Index Cards.

I think I might print out the current iteration of rules so I have something to jot notes on. I still am a little mentally stuck on what the Europe/Danish side will be able trying to achieve during this game. It seems too easy if they could just blow up the Log Flume at any time, so there should be sometype of in-game explanation limiting what they can or cannot do. Actually, I think I just got it. As part of the Scandinavian Alliance, (and to protect the Faroe Islands) explosives have been agreed to not be used in this encounter.

This will open up the ideas of what sabotaging is legit. And I’m thinking it might be interesting to have sabotage attempts remain hidden until examined (if possible) or the waters start flowing. Once the water starts, you can roll to see the effectiveness of the disruption. If enough of the flow of water is disrupted, then the plans are foiled. This will force the game to meet its end condition, and the winner will not be determined until things will be revealed. (I hadn’t thought of this before just now, and am already appreciating the possibilities)

Well, I have a few more ideas jotted down now. And I might be able to create an starting board position, and possibly play a few turns. I have to make cards too, so we’ll have to see. I feel like if I get a general end-to-end in place. With the cards only doing resource generation, (which I could probably code up a quick little script to do for me) I can get ideas for what might be interesting from card playing standpoint.

Since Actions have a cost beyond just the card in your hand, I hope this will allow accumulation of resources early on to spend as the game grows longer.

Anyways, the interesting part of the film is that you can’t take anything tangible with you to start the next day. Anything that’s in your head (and in your muscle memory) stays, but nothing else. So while that would allow me to say: learn every programming language that exists. I couldn’t really write a program that would take longer than 24 hours. Since a board game wouldn’t need a compiler, I could memorize all the rules and pieces and the like. Fashion up a copy in a few hours and find playtesters. Hell, these would be the perfect playtesters, because they would always be experiencing the same game as a clean slate. I’m sure there would be some of “oh it would be cool if you could do this” and then the next day, you make that tweak and then they suggest not doing that because it didn’t work.

I think one of the best parts about Groundhog Day is that even though it was filmed before the Internet and cell phones were abundant, the movie wouldn’t really change all that much with current technology added in. Certain movies/tv shows play off the fact that these objects don’t exist to improve the scene. The first example I thought of was the Seinfeld episode I saw the other day where Jerry is trying to call Elaine from a pay phone. With cell phones, you can just send a text and Elaine can get it when she’s available and get Jerry’s spare key for him. Instead, we have half an episode about George feeling weird letting Jerry into other people’s apartments.

What would you do if you were doing the same thing every day? How would you improve yourself in hopes to break out of the loop? Who is Ned Ryerson?

And so with Christmas just having passed, and I will soon be receiving some board game pieces to actually put some of my designs into the physical realm. Greenland will be the first to get a board, and some game structure. I have a handful of ideas of how gameplay will run, and things you will do during your turn. Once the pieces arrive I should be able to sketch out the board and start some playtesting and creating some resource/action cards to feed the turn cycle. The rulesheet has been fleshed out a bit, but I feel I’m basically at the point where I need to physically attempt to play the game to see how things should go. So once I get a mock-up board and a sample state of the game. I’ll take a picture and upload it. Everything will be in it’s early phases obviously, but even if it’s just a reminder for me years in the future it would be nice to remember back on.

There was too many house rules, too many rules ignored (specifically auctioning of titles) and losers take 6 hours to get knocked out of the game. Now sometimes Risk isn’t much better at that, but at least if everyone teams up they might be able to dislodge the person in the lead. In Monopoly, there really isn’t any player interaction besides “you landed on my square.” So there you have it. I’ve never really liked Monopoly.

Back to the mashup: obviously I always thought using the actual globe as a playground for board games was a good idea. A lot of people complained that you couldn’t zoom in and do the type of things that it sounds like World Monopoly is going to do. But that wasn’t Risk. I wasn’t trying to turn a global domination game into Hearts of Iron. Sure it’s possible, but I don’t know if that would be considered a board game anymore. And besides sharing names, the links to the original game seem slim at best. In general I think this experiment is a good idea, as long as there servers can handle it, which so far haven’t proven that they can. Hasbro is such a large company that it can always benefit from some type of buzz generated by pulling this off well.

Now I guess I’ll answer the question that first came to my mind when I was saw the Monopoly thing on Reddit the other day. How would you do it differently? Well firstly, this feels more like Sim City to me than Monopoly. I still am unsure how the system works besides streets having costs and everyone having seed money. Do people move around the world? Do you make more money? Anyways, I’d start classic Monopoly as the first try. Don’t open it until Multiplayer is playable. Drop it in the original location: Atlantic City, NJ. Try to keep the board as recognizable as possible, even though it won’t be a square. Allow options for turning off auctions, and enabling a few of the most popular house rules. The only one I can think of is the Free Parking = Money Square rule. Once you get it fleshed out, make it esy to transport. Allow the data to be created on the fly, allowing people to jump into a map, mark it up with everything that’s required. Then be able to save it out and use it in their own games. Maybe even have a community map supported system too.

One other option I might add is making your character choice worth-while. I always like the idea of unqieu, balanced characters. So maybe the car could get a +1 movement once per salary loop. That is, after you roll the dice, you may add 1 to your roll. This doesn’t cause you to have doubles. Or maybe the dog can choose to stop (losing the rest of her movement dice) on any street where you already own a property. [Eg. You may stop at Marvin's Gardens if you already own Atlantic Avenue]

This is obviously just a rough idea, and would need to be balanced out to make sure it’s not broken. But it might be a fun way to include the different tokens.

Well I guess that’s all I have about that. For those curious, I did look into Atlantic City debating how well GMMonopoly would have worked. I also considered Stratego as a possibility. Monopoly came before the papers, Stratego afterwards.