Overwhelming Gearwheels 2019-01

01: Why gearwheels, and why do they overwhelm?

These are two of the only words in the SOWPODS tournament word game dictionary that contain my initials, RWHE, in sequence. (See also logo top right.) The four other stems include everwhere, otherwhere, underwhelm, and waterwheel. Are everwhere and otherwhere even words?

However, expect to find more than wordplay within. As goes the motto of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, a company that bears a greater than accidental resemblance to many places I've worked, Share and Enjoy!

Here are some overwhelming (in a good way) gearwheels to start things off. If you don't know what that photo is all about, consult Wikipedia.

Designing games while asleep

I awoke out of a dream the other night and couldn't fall back to sleep until I jotted down an idea for my work in progress, Parallel Pastimes, an idea that in my dream was being propagated by the half-Deep One protagonist of the revisionist Lovecraftian novel, Winter Tide (for some reason). In the morning, I saw it was this:

Massively multiplayer jigsaw puzzles.

I already have more game ideas than I can finish writing, so this will probably be a throwaway bit of design fiction, just a line or two. Kind of a relief. Don't need to go on another hypomanic bender developing this one.

Beyond the behind

January 1 is almost over and I haven't played even one game of my 2019 10x10 challenge. I'm (a) behind in a big way....

I'm thinking of starting a new game group called The Other Other Operation. If you live in the Seattle area, let me know if you're interested in playing some of these games or similar.

02: Operation Metagame: the 10x10 gaming challenge, Dr. Faustus, and my new game night

Today's lengthy post deleted in the name of marital harmony. Perhaps some of it will return later in another form.

03: Play with me

And we're back.

As mentioned, this year I'm participating in the BoardGameGeek metagame of playing 10 different tabletop games 10 times each, known as the 2019 10x10 challenge. For those allergic to hyperlinks, here are my proposed 10 games this year, plus one alternate (#11).

1. Cosmic Encounter
2. Tak
3. Ultima (including my own variant, Hostage Ultima)
4. Alien City
5. Scrabble
6. Zendo
7. Ricochet Pyramids
8. 504
9. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective
10. Engle Matrix Games
11. The Solo System

If you don't know what these games are, do see my BoardGameGeek post. These are not the only games I'm interested in playing this year, of course -- I've obtained three more just since Christmas, and I'm not waiting until 2020 to play them. But if you and I sit down at a table together soon and you suggest one of the games above, I'm unlikely to refuse.

Alas, as much as I want to play these games (as soon as possible, 10 times each or more), to put it as diplomatically as I can, my regular game group Seattle Cosmic Game Night can't meet most of my needs as a gamer anymore. Thus, I'm starting another game group whose working title is The Operation (pythonically a.k.a. The Other Other Operation). We'll hang out periodically at impromptu meetings around the Seattle area and online, codenamed variously Operation Ultima, Operation 504, etc., playing and playtesting weird new games, abstract games, and game systems -- and, of course, conquering the Cosmos from time to time. Won't you come? You might even spin off yet another group with the people you meet.

Right now The Operation has only three members: me, and my friends Karl and Natalie. But we're growing by limps and bounds, so if you're interested in becoming an Operative, don't mind appearing in session reports, and are not a giant hedgehog, leave a cryptically worded message of interest in the comments.

p.s. We may have Operation Chessboard and Operation Cosmic, but as dog is my witness, we will never have an Operation Operation. It would fail to find my funnybone.

04: CRUSH RON

I realized it would be a big help in completing my 2019 10x10 challenge if I could play most of the games in my challenge online at least occasionally. It turns out that most of them are not only soloable (a deliberate choice on my part), but yes, also playable on the Web. So see the table below, sniff around a little on the other side of these links I found, and leave a message in the comments if you'd like to play me at one or another of these games online.

06: The Operating Table

To save time, space, effort, and attention, I've created a table combining the 11 games in my 10x10 Challenge, links to them on BoardGameGeek, links to rules, places to play them online (with me, right?), the number of times I've played them so far in 2019, and notes, all on the ScoreBoard page, with info about the challenge.

I'm going to blog session reports for the Operation the way I used to for Seattle Cosmic Game Night. The Notes column can use short hyperlinks to jump to the session reports in my blog.

Please let me know if this page can be improved in any way, in the comments section.

Gaming for goodness

It would be great if the 10x10 Challenge had some infrastructure for fundraising. Imagine if you could talk your friends into giving some charity 25￠ for every game you completed, or a flat sum if you completed the whole challenge. As a bonus, the money could go to a cause you hate if you failed.

All those gamers playing all those games, and the only good they're doing is having fun! We could probably cure Alzheimer's if we could harness all that cogitation. (Obviously this doesn't apply to gamers playing LCR or Fluxx.)

Note: If someone wants to donate to charity for me on a freelance basis, leave a message in the comments below and we'll work something out...

08: Operation Tak-Tik, a.k.a. Operation Kit-Kat

Date: 6 Jan 2019, 19:00-19:45
Location: Marty and Ron's house, Kent, WA
Attendees: Me, Marty Hale-Evans
Games played: Tak 5x5 (three games)

The Operation, meeting 1.

Tak intrigues me, and I want to learn and get better at it so much that I made it part of my 2019 10x10 Challenge. It helps that a community has rapidly grown up around it. There is a strategy literature, and there are game problems available. I recently went so far as to buy the book Mastering Tak: Level I, but hadn't read it before this meeting.

In fact, I had only played the game once or twice before -- against the Solo System (in other words, an augmented version of myself) -- but it was enough for me to see Tak's inspiring potential. That potential surprised me, because I hadn't usually thought of James "Cheapass" Ernest as a designer of fine abstract games, even though I keep the rules to his chess variant Tishai in my EmergencyGameKit. I had always thought of him as a versatile designer, though, so I expect Tak won't be his last hit in this vein.

Marty hadn't played Tak before at all, and our first game was a fast one, with me as the winner. (I went first.) In keeping with the idea of "friendly postmortems" I'm espousing in my book in progress, Parallel Pastimes, I explained to her some of the strategies I was using, and where I got them.

1. Don't make your roads too dense and tight (Hex, Go).
2. Control the center (Chess).

Marty is quick to pick up games, so naturally, given my own lack of experience, she whupped me in our second game, which took a little longer than the first one. (She went first, per the rules.) I could have stopped Marty's winning move with her tall stack -- a fact that Marty was kind enough to show me after the game....

Marty accepted my "best two out of three" offer, so next we had our longest game yet. I went first and won, but only after we had each taken a mulligan. Thus, I won our series of three. We both noted that the player who went first won all three games. I didn't think much of it, but Marty suspects a strong first-player advantage, which might be alleviated with more experience.

We're still beginners. I'll probably still be a beginner even after I complete my 10 games of Tak for my 10x10. Marty pointed out that we weren't "into the meat of the game" yet; we had barely used walls and hadn't used capstones at all.

Random observations:

• I noted once again how much Tak seems like a cross between Focus and Hex.
• Marty noted that in my set the regular black and white pieces are different shapes, but the capstones are the same. Weird.
• I told Marty about the Cheapskate Gamer Variant that uses only checkers and Chess pieces. She remarked that Go stones might be easier to mark walls with than pawns, and that you could use pawns for capstones instead of Kings.

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