Nostalic Chance With Modern Gaming Brilliance: Galaxy Trucker

One of the most polarizing games I’ve ever played, not just polarizing for individual players but even internally polarizing based off what mood I happen to be in, is Galaxy Trucker by Vlaada Chvatil.

Published in 2007 by Czech Games, Galaxy Trucker makes players take on the role of intergalactic space transporters, trying to reach their destination while avoiding obstacles such as space pirates and meteorites. While on the way to their destination, players should be on the lookout for planets to pick up goods at and abandoned space stations. At the start of the game players have a pile of face down tiles in the center of the table. When everyone is ready, an hourglass is flipped, and players race to construct their space vehicle by simultaneously grabbing tiles and adding them to their board. Players boards function as their space vehicle in progress. These tiles can consist of guns, engines, containers, batteries, and life support systems. Players must build the best, most balanced, and hopefully functional space vehicle they can in an allotted time. After building is complete, a deck of cards is shuffled and then drawn from, triggering the events their vehicles will encounter. Once the deck of cards has expired, whoever still has a space vehicle intact gets points for the resources they picked up along their journey, the order they finished their journey, and have the best, least broken apart ship!

What makes Galaxy Trucker exhilarating and at the same time maddening is the flipping of the event cards. These cards can cause through just random bad luck meteors and lasers to hit their ship which can cause it to break apart, leaving it a wreck of a vessel. In a way, Galaxy Trucker harkens back to classic board games like Yatzee, Monopoly, and Battleship, where through uncontrolled ill fortune, players can be devastated by the role of luck. And this bad luck can snowball. As a ship breaks apart, it becomes even more vulnerable to future attacks.

And yet, many people love Galaxy Trucker, with it ranked even in the top 100 on BoardGameGeek. And I think the reason for this is that people do feel some pull from the nostalgic elements of chance it contains infused with more modern board game design. The building of ships is quite ingenious, where players have to carefully craft the best ship they can to mitigate the odds of ruination to the event cards. It is this contrast of high strategy to random chance that makes Galaxy Trucker truly a unique experience.

I would recommend Galaxy Trucker to anyone who can enter into a game with a light approach. Make no mistake about it. No matter who well you construct your ship, at some point you will get badly screwed over by events out of your control. And that’s okay. Because so will your opponents! Galaxy Trucker can be played in 30 minutes, and can be a hilariously, fun experience when played with the right group!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31481/galaxy-trucker

The Definition of Elegance: Concordia

There seems to be in the board game community this idea of a natural linear progression of tastes. Entering into the hobby through gateway games, party games and filler games, there seems to be an expectation to slowly move beyond them to gateway+ games and to a greater and greater complexity and depth. Because of this ethos in the community, there appears to be this understanding that if you haven’t reached the stages of a heavy, 2 hour +, Euro gamer, you are somehow less evolved or experienced as someone who else reached such a higher echelon.

Aside from this gross conceit in thinking people who are perfectly happy staying in the lighter sampling of games are somehow inferior, I think a perfectly good case can be made that in order to make a greatly strategic and brain-burner game, there does not need to be this rise in complexity, duration, or components. One game that is a perfect example of this high strategy, low complexity variety is Concordia by Mac Gerdts.

Concordia is a game of colonialism where players expand their economic empire around a map to different provinces, building into cities which each specialize in a specific type of resource, such as bricks, wheat, wine, cloth, and stone. Using the same hand of starting cards, on a players turn they must select a card to play and execute that cards particular action. Some actions including building into another city, receiving resources from cities they already control, and trading in a market for money or more desirable resources. Card can be purchased into players hands that will enhance their actions and provide them victory points at the end of the game. Whoever has the most points at the end is the winner.

Concordia is the definition of board game elegance. The rule book includes only 3 pages of text, and the game can be expand is under 10 minutes. And yet, Concordia is fantastically rich in the different choices you have in the game. It is a balancing act between expanding, yet purchasing cards which are necessary to winning, and yet also receiving enough resources. As players play their cards, they must eventually choose on their turn to pick up their played cards rather than perform a normal action. This takes time, yet is necessary to do. Players must always be considering when it is the right time to pick up their played cards so that they can perform the action they need and to not slow themselves down too much through such repetitions.

Concordia’s components are top notch, with pieces shaped like wine bottles, cloth, and bricks. The card stock is thick and durable. One criticism that comes up is the art work, particularly on the box cover. People may be draw away from the game because of the bland but serviceable art work.

I would recommend this game to anyone looking for a game of strategic deep without all the complexity and numerous fiddly rules that can sometimes come with more involved games.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124361/concordia

A Perfect Blend of Mechanics and Theme: Keyflower

Love board games? Ever thought of designing one of your own? If you have ever had that creative spark, and really wish to pursue it, I would recommend you not play Keyflower.

Keyflower is a game so good, so mechanically and thematically perfect that it really might deter you into not even bothering. It has certainly had that effect on me. Having played Keyflower 20+ times, I can tell you that this is as good as it gets for board game design.

In Keyflower each player represents colonialist, having landed into the New World, and attempting to develop their own unique village. The game is played over four rounds, with each round representing a season, beginning with spring and ending in winter. At the beginning of each round, players will receive a number of meeples, representing a new influx of colonists coming off ships, which will be used to assist in the creation of your village. A number of tiles will be randomly selected to be played on the table for players to interact with. These tiles will represent resource areas, such as a timber yard, Key Mine, Quarry, etc or tertiary buildings such as the black smith, wainwright, alehouse, store, etc. On a players turn, they will use their meeple colonists to either bid on the ownership of a tile or rather activate the tile for resources or some service.  As players win bids for these area tiles, they will move them to their village area to be connected by roads. Players get victory points for winning tiles, upgrading their tiles, generating resources of wood, coal, stone and gold, and building up a sizable number of colonists into the village. Whoever has the most victory points at the end of the game wins.

What makes Keyflower so brilliant is the integration of many diverse mechanics including auctioning, tile placement, work placement, area control, and engine building. All of these mechanics make sense thematically, giving real meaning to your economic and calculating actions. In addition, there are a lot of paths to victory, being able to win with many varied strategies. A player can focus on being an industries village, producing many resources to score well in that area. Or a player can maximize on the number of colonists that come into and stay in their village, scoring well in that respect. Or a player can have a very large and renovated village, winning many tiles and upgrading them for a lot of points.

The game is highly viable, with no game having the same set up, as players receive different colored colonists each game (which effects bidding), and different types are placed each game. In addition, the game is very interactive. Players are able to not only use their own tile in their village but also other players tiles, sacrificing a colonist, who thematically has chosen to live in their village now instead.

I would recommend this game to people looking for an interactive, euro game to enjoys that blend of many mechanics. One complaint is that the game’s bidding mechanic can be somewhat cut throat, causing players to be frustrated if they are not paying attention. Although players two essentially two options on a turn, activate a tile or bid on a tile, making it simple to play, the game to be confusing to learn because of the different mechanics involved.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/122515/keyflower

A Lovely Dry Themeless Euro

Let me tell you about one of my favourite game designers, Stefan Feld. Like Uwe Rosenberg, Feld is one of my Mount Rushmore figures of game design. Owning seven of his games, more games than any other designer, Stefan Feld has a way of creating brilliant game mechanics with many interesting choices, that, too me, are a joy to play. Key features Feld is known for in his games include:

“Point Salad” – this is a term that originated from a recurring pattern in Feld’s designs. A “point salad” game means that almost all actions you perform in the game will give you some form of victory points. Although some people may find “point salad” games make decisions feel arbitrary or less significant, from a psychological point of view, this is a very clever design decision. A “point salad” provides continual positive reinforcement to the decisions you make, giving a sense of satisfaction and pleasure throughout.

Themeless Euro – A criticism of Stefan Feld’s games are that they are themeless or rather the theme has been “pasted on”. Rather than integrating mechanics into a theme, a theme can feel almost tacked on by Feld as almost an afterthought. As much as I love Feld’s games, I have to agree with this challenge. If you prefer theme over mechanics, leaning more Ameritrash than Euro, Feld games may not be for you.

Innovative Central Mechanic – One of the things that makes Stefan Feld’s games great are the inventive mechanics he comes up with, combining or putting an original spin to classic gameplay functions. For example, in Bora Bora, players take actions through dice worker placement. Combining the luck of dice rolling with action space denial, players are forced to mitigate bad rolls while paying keen attention to spaces other players may want to use. In Trajan, he creates a unique twist on the classic game Mancala, implementing a mencala device for players to control the actions they take through the puzzle of pieces around a wheel.

During reading week I added another Feld game to my collection called Luna, printed in 2010, but having just got another reprint last year. Luna takes place in a fantasy realm, where each player controls novice monks, trying to win the favor of a Moon Priestess, while entering in a temple. Players must reposition their novices on on seven different islands around the central temple board, to benefit from the changing game state round to round. Essentially, players must track the movement of three character that move in between round to the various islands, and must each gravitate towards them for rewards or avoid them to not be penalized.

Luna is very unique for its section selection. In one way Luna is a worker placement game, where each island represents an action space. However, rather than simply select an action from a particular island, players must plan ahead to get there novices to those islands from previous turns. As a result, there is a high amount of strategy to the game. And with a preset movement of the scoring characters that move around islands, tactics are at a minimum, while long term planning is the key to success. Despite the lack of tactics, there is a significant amount of indirect interaction in the game, as players must pay close attention to how they are moving their novices around islands and into the temple.

I believe Luna is a very good game. I do not think it is Feld’s best game, with Castles of Burgundy and Trajan being superior. Suffering from a truly variable set up, I worry the game might become repetitive after a number of plays, where an optimal strategy and rerouting of novices becomes obvious. However, Luna is relatively quick to learn, visually appealing, and has a plethora of meaningful choices. I would recommend this game to people who enjoy strategic games with minimal theme, who prefer more indirect interaction than direct, take-that opposition.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70512/luna

Design About What You Know

Like William Faukner, who’s writing never seemed to leave the deep American south, or Herman Melville, who’s body of work rests largely on epic seafaring endeavours, Uwe Rosenberg, one of the biggest name’s in modern board game design, has displayed a similar knack for honing his creative output onto a singular theme or locale. For Rosenberg, that theme has been complex farming simulations.

There are only two designers who have ever had two or more games in the top ten on boardgamegeek (the mecca for board gaming hobbyists). Those two designers are the brilliant Vlaada Chvatil, creator of Mage Knight and Through the Ages and Uwe Rosenberg. Unlike Rosenberg, Chvatil has created a wide range of varying types of designs, both in theme, genre and mechanics. From heavy euro games, to party games, to simple tile placement, to even dexterity games, Chvatil seems to have the rare ability to create excellent games in many different forms. Rosenberg, on the other hand, could be said, in the most critical lens, to have only ever made one game in the last ten years. The name of that game has many names and has had many evolutions and iterations over the years, but at its core, contains certain fundamentals. It is a farming game, where each player represents a family in a rural village striving to grow crops, raise livestock, and modernize their home, village, and culinary technology. Players control their farming operation through the board game mechanic of “worker placement”, whereby each turn a player selects an action on a board, receiving an effect, and marking that action space with a “worker” thereby also blocking other players from using that same action for the remainder of a round. The game is played over the course of a number of rounds, and at the end of the last round players receive points for how well they had successfully developed their farm. Whoever has created the most economically viable farm is the winner. This game has many names. Just some of games that fit this mold by Rosenberg include Agricola, Le Havre, At the Gates of Loyang, Ora et Lobora, Agricola: All Animals Big and Small and Caverna.

In his newest creation, Fields of Arle, Rosenberg has designed his most personal and, in my limited opinion of five plays now, his best iteration of his go-to farming simulation. Drawing from mechanics used in the half dozen or more farming games he has created previous to Arle, Rosenberg has piecemealed together what I believe is now his magnum opus. This is an expansive, open optioned game, played over nine rounds, with each round representing six months, for a total of four and a half years of simulated farming. Limited to two players because of the enormous amount of table space the game fills and its play time of 1 hour per players, Fields of Arle is an engrossing experience, where, by the end of the game, you have been thrown through the ringer of making numerous brain-burning decisions that are all grounded very seamlessly thematically.

This is not an introductory, gateway game. With 28 possible actions to chose from in a given turn, a player can really benefit from having played some of Rosenberg’s previous games to have an understanding of the flow of this type of game before hand. However, because of the large number of choices, combined with a variable set up of tile placements during setup, Arle, provides an extensive amount of replayability. There are many paths to victory, and, with that, players are able to flexibly chose from many different directions in the game to focus on, such as animal growth, crop sowing, selling goods to nearby villages, upgrading goods like hides to leather, or constructing buildings inside the community of Arle.

Fields of Arle is quickly becoming one of my favourite games. I would recommend it to someone interested in farming themes, likes heavy Euro games, and enjoys 1 to 2 player games.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159675/fields-arle

Rahdo Runs Through: A Useful Online Analogue Gaming Resource for Beginners and Veterans of the Hobby

One great online resource for analogue gaming is a Youtube channel series titled Rahdo Runs Through. In this channel, Richard Ham, a retired AAA video game designer, having been involved with such commercially and critically successful games as Brink, Fable, and Syphon Filter, offers a unique analogue gaming experience to viewers, unlike almost anything else available online. Taking the duel role of two different players, Ham plays through a board game, performing the actions for both players himself, in order to give the viewer an idea of how that game plays and allowing the viewer to have a clear picture of whether that game might be right for them. Rahdo Runs Through is not ideal for learning a games rules, nor for getting a formal review of a game. What it does provide, however, is a better window into how it might actually feel like to play a particular game than perhaps any other board game resource online. Using a hand held cam, with an alternate steady cam video for those with motion sickness, Ham provides a constant dialogue, in the form of a high energy stream of consciousness, describing his thought processes as he makes decision for both players throughout the game. Although each “run through” video is accompanied with a short video that details his personal assessment of the game, Ham makes clear that he is not a board game reviewer, and that he would wish all viewers of his channel to judge the game he shows in the context of his type of gaming simulation. With over 300 games covered on his channel, Ham highlights a large array of games that are released every year, including many prototype games that are attempted to be published through crowd sourcing sites like Kickstarter. With a preference for playing through Euro games (mechanics over theme), that are removed from “take that” mechanics, and have a player range that reaches two players, Ham does filter out a small portion of analogue games on the market because of certain personal distastes. However, whatever game, whether available through a major publisher or by indie or crowd sourced means, Ham provides only kind, uncritical words towards the mechanics, theme, and designer, knowing that a game can always have the possibility of appealing to someone. Having said this, it is important to emphasis that Ham has stated that he does not receive any compensation by publishers or designers to produce any of his content. In order to finance his channel, being also ad free, Ham runs an annual crowd sourced fundraiser, that gives him enough to purchase all games, attend conventions for video coverage, and maintain quality audio/visual equipment. Rahdo Runs Through is a fantastic source for novice gamers interested in getting into modern analogue gaming, and also veterans of the hobby, looking for the newest game the might spark their interest.

https://www.youtube.com/user/rahdo

Check out this interesting blog post “Unleash Your Organizations Knowledge Sharing Processes”!

http://www.bethkanter.org/knowledge-sharing/

Check out my cover letter!

Here’s a cover letter I made in my MLIS program. Download it and let me know what you think!

Powell.Cover Letter

The Liminality of Librarians: Proxies to Information and People

According to an archived vocational guidance film produced by Iowa State College in 1947 “love for books and love for people” are the two propensities that are salient to having a career in librarianship. To the modern perspective, there is much humor in the heavy-handed narration and hyperbolic acting in the film. Because of this rather clumsy execution, it might be easy to dismiss the information conveyed as a series of banal platitudes and gross reductions from a time long gone by.  However, take a moment to consider the point more seriously. Have the inclinations and, ultimately, values to librarianship actually changed that much? Love for books is more the material representation for the love of information, in all its facets and forms. People are and always will be inextricably linked to libraries, as to all societal institutions. The question that arose in my mind of far more interest is how this love of books which is a passive, individualized an active, social and unifying aim.

Having a background in English, I am reminded of the poem “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Lord Tennyson in which a woman isolated in a high stone tower produces beautiful works of art through weaving tapestries.  The Lady’s only connection to the world is through the reflection of a mirror which provides her a distorted perspective of the countryside from a window opposite her. The poem is often understood as symbolizing the conflict between art and life.

I bring this up, because in a sense, a librarian, like an artist is an intermediary between an abstract, intangible thing, information, and a physical collective body – the society being served. We must immerse ourselves in information and be accessible to patrons. Yet to explore one is to leave the other. As such, I sometimes consider librarians to be ethereal porters in a way, having to bridge a physical domain to an abstract one. Librarians exists in the liminal space between the two. Librarians can neither transplant information directly into patron’s heads, nor can they place patrons into a virtual world with information personified. To reconcile the two opposing areas, libraries act as proxies to both information and people – flowing back and forth in a symbiotic accord to the demands and limitations each entity places on the other. The physical can never meet the actualization of the abstract. The best that can be hoped for is representation and imitation.

The short film deconstructs this process simplistically and practically, focusing on a few broad roles a librarian might represent: cataloguer, reference librarian, circulation librarian and school librarian. Each role places different and stronger emphasis on one of the two binaries. Yet regardless of the approach or role the relationship between people to information remains the same – as it does with the progressing variable of time. As such, this opposition remains as relevant today as 60 years ago, and one that will not be reconciled despite our, the librarians, best efforts.

First Blog!

Salutations! Welcome to my academic blog concerning Librarianship. I am just beginning my studies in the MLIS program at the University of Western Ontario. I am really excited to delve into the field to explore librarianship from a practical and also theoretical standpoint. I will be using this blog to convey my thoughts as I transition through the program to gain a deeper understanding of ideas and practises I encounter through a reflexive orientation. Stay tuned!

Jonathan