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A Year of Game Plays
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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A year ago today, I played my first logged game. To commemorate this occasion, I've compiled some milestones of this last year by month.
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Posted Tue May 12, 2009 6:12 pm
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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May 2008 was my last month at college. There was a week or so after everyone was done with the whirlwind of finals and projects, but before graduation, so free time was, for the first time in four years, really easy to come by. I decided that the best way to celebrate was to play every game in my collection over the course of the week. I had enough support from friends to be able to do this, so for five days, I basically played games with friends from morning to night. Not a bad way to spend a week! It'd be a nice mix of party games, word games, and strategy games, and even a game or two I'd never opened before (and would never open again), like Cranium Grab & Go Mega Marbles.
At the time I owned about 50 or so games, but we plowed through them pretty well. During Music Catch Phrase on Tuesday night, a strange occurrence: the big heavy window in my apartment somehow fell out of its sliders, landing squarely on my friend's head, and grazing another. No lasting injuries, gladly, but that was enough to knock her out of commission for the night. Ouch.
All told, we didn't quite get to every game. Malarky, .hack//ENEMY, and a homemade game were left unplayed, but it was a great way to finish my life in Pittsburgh.
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2.
Board Game: Sleuth
[Average Rating:6.81 Overall Rank:453]
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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Starting the first Monday of June 2008, I had a programming job waiting for me near Charleston, SC - a place where I had never been, and where I knew no one anywhere nearby. Luckily, however, thanks to BGG I was able to hook onto an established board game group down here, the Lowcountry Strategy Gamers. And what's more, I got to go to a game night that first week. I played a couple games with a group of 3 others a few years older than me, while another group played a very long game (wish I knew what) that started before I got there and was still going as I was leaving. Sleuth was the very first game I played down here, with Amyitis following closely behind. I've never played either game since, although I did enjoy them. As I was getting up to leave the game night, the people I was just playing with noticed my work badge was still on. As it turns out, all three of them worked together at the same place I do! They're just a floor below me, working on a different product, and they often met during lunch and after work for some quick plays. Sweet! Good thing I forgot to take my badge off. This started a nice long tradition of getting to meet with them after work usually once a week. At the start I "made" them play Zombie Fluxx, Saga, Masquerade, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and other games it took me a while to realize they didn't enjoy that much, because I'm bad at reading people. 
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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By July I was getting a bit more settled into the group, and one of the more memorable events of the month was a Heroscape "tournament." Five of us got together and had three maps set up, and we each chose a preconstructed 500-point (I think) army, and we played "round robin" style. I got to use a wolf-centric army, and got to face off against samurai peasants, vampires & ghosts, and cyborg snipers for an awesome day of fun. I've come to love HeroScape's system, which reminds me somewhat of the Heroes of Might & Magic series battles. Combine that with such great matchups as zombies vs. Revolutionary War soldiers and you've got a winner.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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August held the 2008 Redemption National Tournament, in Columbus, Ohio. A real short trip from my former home of Pittsburgh, a bit of a longer haul from South Carolina. I had been to the Southeast Regional Tournament last month in Atlanta, and was itching to go - I've been playing since 1996 and have never made it to a National tournament. Unlike some other CCGs with tournament structures, the high-level tournaments are not invite-only or anything, they're completely open. But it was looking like plane tickets for such short notice were running almost $500, which was quite a bit more than I wanted to spend, so I was resigned to missing yet another tournament. Then I learned that someone at work was selling a plane ticket voucher for $200 - I knew this was something I could not give up. I played more Redemption in that three-day period than some thought possible, but it was also a wonderfully fun time. I even ended up winning the tournament's "main event," which went ridiculously far beyond anything I expected (at Regionals, I had come in near the bottom, and 10-year-olds I was facing were trying to give me deck advice during the games). Sadly, I haven't played since, because unlike where I'd previously lived, there are no Redemption playgroups in the area, and I haven't been feeling like online play. Nationals is being held in California this year, so I haven't even been thinking of attending. Still, it was a great time.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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September has been my worst gaming month since I've recorded plays, and I don't know why. But only 26 plays happened. Sad. I was introduced to some great games this month, though, like Galaxy Trucker, Witch's Brew, and Fairy Tale, and I got to introduce Wits & Wagers to my church group. Sadly, I haven't played it with them in a long while, since one of the group really dislikes it. I think it's because of her answer of "400 feet" to the "length of the longest blue whale" question. This month also had my only plays of Ys and Edel, Stein & Reich.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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October was the only time (as far as I know) that our group played Master of Rules. Even though it was a fun play, I'm glad we haven't broken it out since: I won, so I've gotten to keep the title "Master of Rules" for seven months now! I haven't been able to have the rest of my group call me that, but in my heart, I know it to be true.
Also in the month was one of our few "theme" days: Michael Schacht Abacus-Spiele Skinny Box Super-Fillers! We started in China and continued east to California, crossed another ocean ocean to get get to Paris Paris, and ended our tour in Hansa.
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7.
Board Game: Spoons
[Average Rating:5.36 Overall Rank:5213]
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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Every Thanksgiving is a cherished family tradition: the vicious Spoons match. This game always ends in broken spoons, deep wounds, and tears, but that means it also ends in victory! In recent years the event has been growing to an extent that we've had to get serious: We taped two circles on the ground, a spoon-only zone and a card-only zone, because a false spoon-grab ends in too much turmoil to risk that happening without punishment. So we brought out The Spoons Box, carrying tattered remains of dozens of decks of cards and some no-longer-usable metal spoons, most of them in one piece. The cards are covered in mystery and unknown fluids. Why is one deck themed around Camel Cigarettes? Why did someone modify this 9 of hearts with a black pen to be a 4 of clubs? Can you win if you have four "Draw Four Wild" cards in your hand? Does a Skip-Bo "11" match a Jack? (No.) And for the love of spoons, how does that Queen look so manly?
This year I had my best performance, getting into the Final Three, even surpassing the reigning champion, my dad, but my 30-year-old cousins had the speed and wrestling skills needed to knock me out of the game. And I think there might still be blood stains on my aunt's carpet.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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It's a great family when a Christmas gift of the Battlestar Galactica board game is well-loved by my parents. My parents and their friends got together every weekend for Battlestar viewing nights, and they enjoy some games, so this seemed perfect, and it went great! The ruleset was a bit much, but a great time was still had by all. And my dad makes a good Cylon, even though he revealed himself almost as early as possible each time. Despite never having watched the show myself, I enjoyed it immensely, and the few times I've played this game afterwards (although not with my parents) have been enjoyable. However, I've yet to play the game with people that have played before, so every game is a teaching game. Every game, coincidentally, is also a game where Cylons win.
December was also when I got my games Malta! and Dash back from ArtsCow. I was able to give some copies out as gifts, and have been selling copies to others who want them. It's awesome to have high-quality versions of games I've made, rather than slips of paper sharing a sleeve with CCG cards, and even more awesome to be able to share the fun.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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In January I had some old friends from high school come down for a visit - and an escape from the cold. We got a remarkable amount of games in, including a memorable play of Nexus Ops. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/372622 has all the details, but to keep it short: My friend Jake, after learning the rules, decided to blow all his starting rubium on a Lava Leaper, and had a bear of a time getting any money afterwards. With his low troop count, I was able to go over and eliminate all his troops. We had to check the rules to see what happens: A player can be eliminated by losing his last unit and being unable to purchase any more, through rubium and selling cards. When this happens, the game ends, and the player with the highest VP score wins.
After losing his troops, he ditched all his cards for one rubium a piece, sent a weak force to attack me, and ended the game with me in the lead at only 11 VP.
As fun as this was, I highly recommend following the above link and reading Nazhuret's story of the event.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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February was the month of trick-taking games. Most days at lunch, one of my friends would bring a new one for us. We got in:
Oh Hell!
Wizard
Die Sieben Siegel
Auf falscher Fährte
David & Goliath
Flaschenteufel
Blindes Huhn
Rook
Mückenstich
It was cool seeing each game's variation on the theme, and the difference in flavor was definitely more noticeable than I expected. Saboteurs, sliding scales of what cards win, "batteries" of cards, and so on gave a nice well-rounded view of trick-taking, for a relative outsider like myself (beyond Hearts and Setback, I knew essentially zero).
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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In March, I got some Hip Pocket games and a few others from a friend at work who was "cleaning out" his collection, and I got to give some of them a shot during this month. Nexus was pretty cool, and some others, like Steam Tunnel and Agora, were alright, so I got a little mileage out of them.
Also this month was when my little apartment became THE place for college students back up in the northeast to go to for Spring Break. I had three distinct groups of people come down here, and we had fun enjoying the area and, at night, playing some great games, including back-to-back late-night Starfarers sessions (the picture above is from one of them). Al-Tim got a friendship card allowing him to ask people for resources, but forces the other player to lose a fame ring if he does not comply. We all ended up with no fame rings because we refused to unload our precious trade goods to him. He was a bit upset.
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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A trip back to school in April gave me the opportunity to bust out Bananagrams for four days straight, each session at least an hour. I love word puzzles, and getting to do it in game form was even better. We soon learned that disallowing two-letter words was a good idea to keep from just going "Peel! Peel! Peel! Peel!" in rapid-fire. After a few more games, some of us were thinking about disallowing three-letter words too. We noticed in the rules that one proposed variant is to make the words abide by some theme, like "food and drinks" or "animals," and that seems absolutely impossible to do. Has anyone ever attempted doing that?
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Tim Mierz
United States
Mount Pleasant
South Carolina
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Back in December, one of the founders of our game group left to live in Germany, working at a military base there. Last week, in May 2009, we once again played board games with him, thanks to the power of Skype. After work, we started setting up the Netherlands map for Age of Steam and sent a picture of the setups to him with the help of the magic of the iPhone, and he matched our setup so we could play over the phone. The overall length of that game wasn't much longer than if he'd been there in person, since it was easy enough to follow each of our actions on his side. Even pronouncing the Dutch cities didn't slow us down too much.
Power Grid - China/Korea (China map) did take longer though. A lot more little things to take stock of, bigger quantities of money to add and subtract, and lots of double- and triple-checking of the resource market, cities, and everything made it take three hours to play. Still a good game, but we know what to avoid for next time.
Finally, I just got in my 700th logged play today, my first logged Through the Desert play. 700/365 isn't too bad a ratio.
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Posted Mon May 4, 2009 6:03 pm
