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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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Game news, weekend edition:
• Which game beat out Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy, Le Havre and Thunderstone in best game of the year voting? Ryo Kawakami's Cat & Chocolate. Yes, really.
The voting was for the 2010 Japan Boardgame Prize, and while you might think that hometown pride played a role in which game ended up on top, the write-up on U-more.com notes that 2010 is the first time that a native Japanese game has won the prize. The four titles listed above came in second through fifth. Cat & Chocolate was released in Japan by Qvinta Essentia and distributed globally by Japon Brand; a French edition will appear in late 2011 from Moonster Games as Texas Zombies.
• In 2006, North Star Games was able to get Wits & Wagers into a small number of Target stores as a sales test, a test that the game subsequently passed, leading to the game being sold through the chain nationwide, even five years on.
Now Steve Jackson Games is trodding that same path with Munchkin. As noted in a March 31, 2011 Illuminator post, "selected Target locations will be carrying special Munchkin sets during the month of April. These locations are a test; if Munchkin sells well, more Target stores might pick up Munchkin..." As one might expect if one knows the history of Munchkin, these Target-bound sets will include special Munchkin-related goodies available nowhere else.
• On MeepleTown, in an article titled "Complex Scoring and 7 Wonders", Derek Thompson uses this Antoine Bauza design as an example of what not to do when constructing a scoring system:
Quote: I liked 7 Wonders; it's fast and the gameplay is unique and fluid, but I did feel a sense of "idiocy" regarding the scoring. I didn't know what I was doing, but neither did anyone else. All I had figured out was that military seemed strong and I didn't understand science, so I didn't bother. But even for an experienced gamer like me, one aspect of the scoring was so unclear at the beginning that I simply ignored it, and that's not good game design.
I get what Thompson is saying – especially since the rules explanation for 7 Wonders combined with scoring seems to take as long as the game itself – yet after 30+ plays I do have a sense of how I'm doing during the game, as well as how my neighbors are doing and what they're trying to achieve. You get a sense for the game's flow and what you need to do in the next turn or two to prepare for the next age. You learn the composition of the decks and which cards you can pass on the assumption that another might be coming. Not everyone will want to give a game thirty tries to gain that insight, though, especially for a game lasting more than 30 minutes.
In some ways, 7 Wonders compares with Agricola in that the satisfaction from playing comes from building your own world/farm. You decide whether you want, say, huge pastures or a strong military presence based on both your style of play and the opportunities left to you by other players, then you try to make the most of each action to put the shine on everything. In Agricola, sometimes you look at your farm and know it pales in comparison to someone else's, with the scoring only serving as an official way to record this difference; 7 Wonders comes across the same way. Thoughts?
• GameZebo interviews Milton Soong from Zabu Studio, which has produced Facebook versions of three designs from Reiner Knizia: Lost Cities, Pickomino and Poseidon's Realm, this last design being a Bejeweled-style of game and something new for Facebook and not a solo adaptation of a previously released game. The next title from Zabu for Facebook is Take it Easy!, with a few more Knizia games in the pipeline.
• Canadian publisher FoxMind has overhauled its website, with special sections for newly released and upcoming games, as well as its most popular titles. A fair number of the game listings include downloadable rules, with a select few having rule videos. More rules please!
• French site Tric Trac has posted a slew of photos from the 2011 GAMA Trade Show.
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), but it seems odd to equate "mathy scoring that I don't care for" with bad design.
How is scoring in 7 Wonders hard? 
