Games Overboard

I have a few designers that are my favorites.  Friedmann Friesse has always been innovative and interesting (Power Grid, Funny Friends, Fast Flowing Forest Fellers).  Vlaada Chvatil is easily my favorite designer of late (Dungeon Lords, Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker).  The great thing about gaming is that there are always new people to experience games from.  A Designer I’ve heard a lot about, but never played any games by is Richard Breese.

With our recent cutbacks on games purchasing, I’ve been trying to get out some games that haven’t been played yet.  I received one Richard Breese game (Key Harvest)  from Rio Grande about a year ago (thanks to Jay Tummelson) and I also received a copy of Reef Encounter as “payment” from Z-man games for doing some demos at our local game stores.

It doesn’t happen often, but we played both of these in one night and I got a drastically different feeling from these two games by the same designer.  Here are my impressions about both games.

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I have to admit that I’m not a Monopoly player anymore.  Ever since I taught Liv my strategy of “buy everything and damn the expense” she’s won every game, and frankly I think the dice hate me.  So I just stopped playing.

But that said, some of my favorite gaming memories from childhood revolve around the old Monopoly game board.  Fighting over who got to be the race car with my brothers.  Trying to figure out why there were never enough 20s.  Making fun of Dad when he ended up Going Directly to Jail without passing “GO.”

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I wanted to post a quick thank you to everyone who attended the Gaming for Haiti event this past Sunday.  We had a great crowd show up and raised over $450 for the cause.  Thanks to all the participants and organizers.  We hope to see each of you at another gaming event in the near future.

We’ve all done it.  We’ve promised ourselves, our spouses, and our wallets that there would be no new game spending.  And like a heroin addict, we;ve broken that promise.  We can’t help it.  There are so many new shiny games out there. To make matters, worse there are people like us here at Games Overboard telling everyone about all these games that they have to own and tempting you.

Well, my friends.  I’m making that promise loud and proud.  I will not be spending money acquiring new games for a while.  Note the ambiguous tone in the word “while”  I guess I could turn around and say 12 hours is still a while.  WEll, not this time.  My family may be going through a financial change soon that will require us to tighten the old pursestrings.  Don’t worry, it’s nothing devastating, and it’s a conscious choice by us, but it will require that we cut back on ancillary spending.

On a high note, it will also probably allow for more time recording reviews.  As much as Mark has been amazing writing content a lot lately, I know you are all dying to see some more video reviews.  This change may actually help to allow more time for that  aspect of the site.

So for now I’ll be resigned to only opening the shrink on the 25-30 games that I have in my “never been played” box.  I’ll be exploring the games I do have in depth a little more and be reporting back to you on the status of the dust on top of some long forgotten favorites.

Of course, if any of you ahve any games that need a good home, I’m always prepared to accept them as a “foster” parent.

Take care and thanks for reading.

Now I’m not really a D&D player, and yes, in the past I’ve even been one of those brutes making fun of them.  But I’ve softened over the years, and I’ve even tried my hand at a round or two (and been wiped out by my own team because, yeah, I was just that bad at it.)

So while it’s not my game, I appreciate that there is a large group of people that do appreciate it, and have a need to play whenever possible.  Unfortunately for those players in prison in Wisconsin, they’re going to have to wait for parole to get their hands on a D20 again. Read the rest of this entry »