And so we finally come to the most recently released Alea game--and also the one I've played the most this year--Witch's Brew. It's a return to a lighter, filler sort of game, and I think the most successful one in that category other than the ground-breaking San Juan.

Witch's Brew is a pretty unique game that I'd ultimately have to say depends on role-selection, but with a lot of quirks. Basically there are 12 different actions (roles) in the game. Each round you select 5 that you're going to try to take. Then it turns into a bluffing game. One player selects a role. Then each other player who has the role either takes over the main power or else accepts a subsidiary (and less powerful) power. The catch with taking the main power is that one of the other players may then take it from you, if there's anyone who hasn't declared yet; you also have to go first next turn, which is almost always bad, since you have to try to take the main power, and usually don't get to do it.

The role cards ultimately let you engage in some resource management as you collect three different resources and try to turn those into victory points.

A couple of the players that I last played Witch's Brew with said they really enjoy the game because of the gotcha! factor--the way you can smugly grab a power from someone ahead of you after they thought they had it made. I rarely see a game with as much thrill of victory and agony of defeat as this one unless it's a dice game. And given that I think that dice games can be some of the most adrenaline-boosting and stomach-dropping games around, that's high praise.

There's a lot of other stuff that's good in the game. Though the results of an individual turn can be chaotic, you can still do lots of strategic planning before each round, and some of it will usually pay off. The chaos factor is decreased by the fact that a player's current set of resources can tell you a lot about what they're going to do. There's also some opportunity for nice brinkmanship, as you will probably occasionally choose cards that you can't immediately use in the hope that you'll be ready by the time someone tries to call the role.

Overall, Witch's Brew is a game that's fast but not necessarily light.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen. C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich. B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters. B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan. A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue. C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV. B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo. B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates. B (Plays: 3)
M3: Augsburg 1520. B+ (Plays: 2)
L11: Notre Dame. A (Plays: 6)
L12: In the Year of the Dragon. A (Plays: 5)
M4: Witch's Brew. A (Plays: 5)

And that concludes my analysis of all of the Alea games published to date. Over the last four publications, from Augsburg 1520 to the present, I think that the series has reached a Renaissance, and I hope it continues (although I wish there was more variety of designers among the big box games, even given the fact that I've generally like Feld's games).

If Alea Iacta Est makes it out this year (and who knows with Rio Grande!), I'll surely add it to the series, and I also plan to assess all the supplements when the Treasure Chest comes out. For now, though, keep your eyes peeled over at BGN, where I plan to publish a synopsis of some of my Alea thoughts on Thanksgiving.

In the Year of the Dragon is currently the last big-box Alea game, and I think it really stands up to the most strategic of the series.

The object of In the Year of the Dragon is to earn the most victory points while carefully managing a number of resources and preparing for upcoming disasters. There are four different disasters: Mongol invasions which require warriors, disease which requires healers, famine which requires rice growers to have made rice, and Imperial taxes which require money. In addition, there's one opportunity: a festival, which gives bonus VPs to people who have fireworks.

Throughout the game, you're thus trying to balance which workers you acquire and how you use them. Money is further important because you might need it to buy VP generators or to buy an action that someone used ahead of you. Another thing that you have to keep constantly in mind is the size of your palaces, because if you don't have room for new workers you have to toss old ones out onto the street. Finally, the type of workers you hire can have a big effect on when you go in the round, which is another thing you have to constantly keep track of.

Calling In the Year of the Dragon a resource-management game seems to understate the gameplay, because the various resources that you have to manage (workers, palaces, victory points, money, rice, fireworks, and the worker track) are so different that this is clearly not just a game of figuring out when you need indigo and when you need coffee. It's a complex web of interrelations and that's what makes it an interesting game.

In the Year of the Dragon is also a scarcity game, meaning that you constantly feel like you're falling behind the curve on demands that are slowly overwhelming you. This is the second time that author Feld used this style of play, with the first being the rats of Notre Dame. Here it (as laid out by the disasters) is much more important, however--really, the core of the game.

I think In the Year of the Dragon is a good game because it's high strategy, low randomness, and it allows for a lot of forward thinking. Mind you, I don't always like that in a game, but when I do this is an excellent choice because it's still pretty fresh and original. It's also very tight and there are a few different paths to victory:

Do you try and stay totally clear of disasters, or do you sometimes give up resources as the lesser of two evils? Do you cycle characters or try and keep your full complement? Do you earn your points with scribes who require you to take a book action or do you pick up VP generators early on and just try and tread water while they do their work? Do you try and push to the start of the worker track or do you accept that you'll be last and take lots of excellent workers with that understanding?

I'm won with multiple strategies, which is my usual mark of a good strategy game.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen. C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich. B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters. B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan. A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue. C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV. B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo. B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates. B (Plays: 3)
M3: Augsburg 1520. B+ (Plays: 2)
L11: Notre Dame. A (Plays: 6)
L12: In the Year of the Dragon. A (Plays: 5)

I'm going to close out by noting that I've found an interesting correlation between Notre Dame and In the Year of the Dragon. I know a number of players who love one and hate the other and vice-versa, though they're both games by the same publisher and same designer, put out very near each other and both using scarcity mechanics. I can understand the difference: Notre Dame feels a lot lighter and like you have more control while In the Year of the Dragon is more strategic and more demanding. Indeed, though I've rated both equally well, I enjoy Notre Dame much more (though I seem better at In the Year of the Dragon).

Had a game of Arkham Horror scheduled as our saturday gaming today, in honor of the holiday. We also played with the (newish) expansion, Innsmouth Horror.

After about 5.5 hours of failing to get sufficient gates closed down (in large part due to an inability to seal gates for a couple of hours), we finally had Rhan-Tegoth awaken, with us needing 17*6 = 102 combat successes to kill him. Much to our surprise, we did, primarily because he could only wound one investigator each turn. I think 3 of the 6 investigators got killed before he was taken down. I'm never quite sure whether a battle with an Ancient One is a climax or an anti-climax in a game of Arkham Horror.

Still, nice color and fun wanderings about the town, as always.

Though we had the Innsmouth Horror expansion out, we never went to Innsmouth, because not a single gate or monster appeared there the entire time. That's a problem I've had with the other city expansions in the past. Ah well. We still used new investigators, new Arkham encounters, a new GOO, and probably some other assorted stuff from the set.

---

On my way home from EndGame, I swung into our neighborhood back at Ashby, and I was amazed how many kids there were trick or treating. We've had years where we kept the lights blazing and not a single trick-or-treater showed up. Today, while she was waiting for me to get home, Kimberly said she had two groups knock (but we had no candy, alas, due to those kidless years).

It made me wonder if there's a change in the atmosphere of the country generally. For years Bush and his corrupt cronies tried to bury us in FEAR, telling us that everything was bad and everyone wanted to kill us (no surprise, with that jackass as our leader). Now we instead have a new President pushing hope.

Could that be the change that has parents willing to escort their kids around the neighborhood again?

Or it could just be a fluke or the fact that it was a Saturday this year. I dunno.

I'll again say that I don't understand how Stefan Feld has controlled the Alea large box line since Rum & Pirates. However, Notre Dame is definitely one of my favorites in the line, so I can't complain. And perhaps the secret is in the fact that Feld continues to design games which feel very different from one another.

Notre Dame is a card and resource management game. Each player has a number of buildings which allow him to do various things, such as earn gold, victory points, cubes, keep the rat population down, etc. A player preps for each round of play by drafting three cards which let him utilize the various buildings, then uses two of them. When a card is played, a cube is added to the building and the player then takes its effect. Most buildings have powers that increase triangularly, e.g.: 1 gold, 2 gold, 3 gold, etc.

I'll also argue that Notre Dame is a worker placement game with some twists, namely:

1. Where you can place workers is determined by cards acquired through a card draft.
   
2. Workers remain placed on buildings, and the more you add, the more utility you get out of each building.
   

The other big innovation of Notre Dame is, of course, the rats. Notre Dame was one of the earlier games that was heavily based upon tight, negative economics, where you were always just one step ahead of total failure. (Perhaps following on the heels of Age of Steam.) I think that In the Year of the Dragon, Feld's next game, continues the trend. (And we've since seen it in Agricola, La Havre, and others as well, of course.)

Since its release, Notre Dame has been one of my favorite Alea games. It plays quickly and simultaneously gives you a lot of actions over the course of the game. In addition, it not only supports a lot of paths to victory but in fact encourages specialization thanks to its triangular power rankings. (I do offer have suspicions that some paths are better than others; I, for example, usually try and hit the VP generator hard, while getting just enough from other buildings to scrape by.)

I also find Notre Dame to do quite well in how it manages luck. There is definite luck in which cards you draw and thus which actions you can take. However, Notre Dame offsets it in two ways. First, you're drafting cards, so you can always try and work toward what you actually want. Second, you're guaranteed to see all 9 of your cards every 3 turns. You don't get to use them all, because of the draft, but you do get to choose whether each one is important to you.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen. C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich. B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters. B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan. A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue. C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV. B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo. B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates. B (Plays: 3)
M3: Augsburg 1520. B+ (Plays: 2)
L11: Notre Dame. A (Plays: 6)

I'm somewhat surprised that Augsburg 1520 didn't get more attention. It's a tough, strategic game, perhaps the heaviest in the whole Medium Box series, and yet it was just a blip on the gaming RADAR. I know I didn't bring it to gaming much because it was a bit too tough for me personally, but I don't know why no one else ever brought it around.

The game is one of economics. You're managing money in order to buy favors from several different nobles. You then use those favors (which are effectively four different currencies) to win auctions and in turn use those victories to increase your ability to earn money, victory points, and new favors.

The most original aspect of the game is the auction. You bid for how many cards you're going to play and then everyone who "calls", saying they're going to play the highest value of cards bid, secretly puts down a set of cards. The player with the single highest valued card in his bid wins. So, you have to balance both your highest valued cards and the breadth of cards you have in a suit. You can win either by out-valuing your opponents or by out-counting them. Usually it's a balance between the two extremes.

The second really original aspect of the game is that there are two victory-point barriers, at 25 VP and at 45 VP. You have to build a certain structure (a church or a cathedral) to be able to go past those barriers. Building them takes great sacrifices in money (though you get the cost down if you can manage to build after other people) and also takes winning a specific type of auction (unless you've "saved up" a build by hiring a master builder earlier in the game).

Overall, I think there are a lot of interesting elements that go together quite well, and though I'll admit that the theming is a bit paper-thin (as has really been the case in all of the medium-box games up to this point, which is to say Palazzo and Louis XIV), that's my only real complaint (other than the fact that the game is a bit mathy and/or non-forgiving for me personally much of the time).

I'm not convinced there's a huge amount of depth to Augsburg 1520. The little economic machine that you're building is pretty simple, with just a few different levers, and so there are limits to how many different paths you can take. Nonetheless, I think it's got as much depth as any of the other medium-box games to date.

As with some of the other games around this period in Alea, I thus think that Augsburg 1520 has ended up somewhat underappreciated.


L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates B (Plays: 3)
M3: Augsburg 1520 B+ (Plays: 2)

Fortunately next up we have some games that I think have been well appreciated, and which represent an overall return to strength in the Alea line.

I find it interesting that Stefan Feld designed all three of the newest Alea Big Box games. Does he have an "in" with the developer or is he just developing exactly what's desired? It's probably impossible to say.

Of Feld's three Alea designs--Rum & Pirates, Notre Dame, and Year of the Dragon--I'm pretty sure this first one is the least respected. That's because it feels like a very different sort of game, a light family game to be precise. Not that Alea hasn't developed in that space before. Adel Verpflichtet is certainly a game of very similar weight. It's just not the game space that people who see Puerto Rico as the epitome of the Alea series are looking for.

Anyway, Rum & Pirates is a really innovative expansion of the worker placement genre. We've certainly seen the genre in other games--like Caylus, Agricola, and Pillars of the Earth--but no other game does worker placement like Rum & Pirates. Here, you have a group of pirates wandering from one intersection in town to another. Each intersection gives some special powers (making them the roles that you select with your workers). On your turn you place down one or more pirates that lead you to a new intersection, take the power of the intersection, then go again if you want to spend a coin.

I suspect most people don't even think of this game as worker placement (or role selection if you prefer to open the category a little wider), but it surely is. It just offers a different sort of worker placement than any other game because it's heavily geographically based. Add that to some other original features and you have several elements that I'd like other designers to think of, namely:

• Role selection that is geography constrained based on what the last person did (e.g., you can only go to nearby intersections).
  
• A resource cost for role selection that's also based on geography (e.g., it takes different numbers of pirates to get to different places).
  
• An option to take additional roles for a separate resource cost (e.g., the gold to take extra turns).
  

Having written that all down, I see one category of games that shares some similarities with Rum & Pirates--the roundel role selection games. They use roundels to limit what roles you can select in future turns, but they're much more constrained, and they're closer to role selection than worker placement because they're more unitary.

Generally, I think that all or most of Feld's games are worker-selection games of different sorts, which is probably a topic that's worthy of an article all its own.

Rum & Pirates also has a lot of die-rolling to it. You dice to see who wins inn tiles, who gets sleeping positions on the boat, and who gets stung by the scorpion. That's probably the thing that turns away most serious gamers. Though I'm perfectly happy to have some luck in my games, especially when it's somewhat controlled (and Rum & Pirates does have rum barrels, which give you some control by offering you rerolls), even I think that there's too much die rolling in the game. Primarily, I think, because a lot of the die rolling is very repetitive.

So, serious gamers may not be entirely into the game, but then they're not the intended audience either. It's families who are, and for them I find Rum & Pirates a generally interesting game, though both I and other players have concerns that it might run too long for that category of players. But, we're not that category of gamers, so what can we say for sure?

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates B (Plays: 3)

I think I was actually supposed to play Augsburg 1520 next, but they came out the same year (2006), so no big ...

And I just discovered that the next big box game is Stefan Feld too! It's called Macao and it'll be lucky #13.

I'll have to admit, Palazzo is not one of my favorite games. Though some of the other Alea games strike me as not being quite my speed, Palazzo often just strikes me as awkward.

I should probably summarize the game first. The object of the game is to build up palazzos made up of multiple floors of a building. You bid for those floors in auctions and/or purchase them. Each one is made of a specific material, has 1-3 windows or doors, and has a number from 1-5 (which must be placed in increasing order as you build). Final value of each palazzo is dependent on how many floors it contains, whether it's all made of one material, and how many doors and windows it has.

There's a lot that's clever in Palazzo.

The auction is built around a Knizia favorite: multiple currencies, here embodied by three different colors of cards. Much as with Taj Mahal, a previous Knizia Alea game, you choose a currency at the start of an auction and have to stay in that. Much like Taj Mahal there are also some "neutral" cards, here low-valued 2s and any triplet of cards (one per color in the same value).

It also feels like there's a lot of variety in only three options. Each turn you choose to reveal new palazzo tiles, distribute money, or rearrange some already built buildings. It's often a hard choice that makes you constantly feel like you're giving up competitive advantage to your opponents, no wonder what you do. I always love hard choices in a game.

My problems with Palazzo all have to do with the scoring. Because you've got orthagonal scoring for both the height of a building and its composition, I find the scoring very opaque, a topic I wrote about during my Kniziathon of 2007. Perhaps because of that I feel like Palazzo fits into the games-you-can't-think-about-too-much category (a possible topic for a future BGN column). If you play fast and from the gut, it's fun, but if you start getting bogged down in the calculations of your actual score ... it can lose all of its zing.

Oh, and Palazzo sure felt like it was out-of-place with what came before and after it in the medium box series--Louis XIV and Augsburg 1520, both heavier games.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo B- (Plays: 6)

I must admit, that having now played through the first fourteen Alea games, I'm minorly befuddled by the decision to exchange Alea's small box line for these medium boxes. Looking over the series, there's not much that couldn't have fit into the small boxes. Sure, the purview extended a bit beyond the card-centric games of the past, but Witch's Brew is enough of a pure card game that it could have fit right into the previous line. Palazzo too, for that matter, even if it uses tiles instead.

So, I have to guess it was primarily an economic decision, as Alea can doubtless charge a bit more for a game in a medium box than a card game in a small box.

---

Moving on to Louis XIV. It's a unique majority-control game, played out over a collection of 12 connected tiles. Here's what I think makes it unique:

1.) It has a strong geographical basis. Though I love most majority-control games, starting way back with El Grande, too many of them have weak geographical basis; things adjacent to each other don't matter very much. Contrariwise, in Louis XIV, what's next to each other matters quite a bit.

2.) That's because of Louis XIV's second unique mechanism. When you place your markers, you get to place a set of three. You could just place those all on the tile corresponding to the card you play--but you can actually do more by laying them out across a path of adjacent tiles, either 3-0, 2-1, 1-2, or 1-1-1.

I think this really shows how close majority-control and auction are. Because you have the ability to string markers over several tiles, you're largely encouraged to "bid low" by keeping a minimal number of markers on several tiles, then only increasing those numbers as other people "bid you up".

3.) There are several different mechanisms to determine who won a tile: 1st only gets the reward; 1st gets the reward but everyone else can pay for it; and everyone gets it if they put sufficient markers (2-3) on the space. Because you're bidding in all of these sorts of auctions at the same time with the same markers, you have to constantly compromise and/or figure out how to get what you want.

To be honest, I wasn't totally enthused by the game the first time I played it. I found it a little dry and a lot slow, but I think the latter ended up being because of one or more players who were very APed for that first game. Every other game of Louis XIV that I've played has come in a lot faster than that first game.

Now, I consider it a very strong contender for a game to be brought out whenever a mid-weight, mid-length game is required. It's got a nice amount of strategy, a nice amount of tension, and is original enough that I don't every feel like I've played enough of its sort of game.

Because my appreciation of it has risen over time, I'm more surprised that other players are so-so on it. But I got a better understanding of why when I played the game again just before writing up this piece. Several of the players there said that it was too abstract, and I'll agree that there isn't a very good correlation between the theming of Louis XIV's court and the play of putting down markers on cardboard tiles. I get no feeling of the intrigues of the sun court.

Players also said that they didn't think its mechanics were original enough: it was just another of many mid-weight majority control games. Though I do find a lot of originality here, I understand their point, because the originality of Louis XIV is pretty subtle.

One of the things that I find the most amusing about Louis XIV is that it was the game that really locked in Rudiger Dorn as an interesting designer, for me, and that's because it made me understand one defining point of his designs. He likes to create grids and then take normally abstract mechanics and position them on the grid. He did it in Traders of Genoa (trade/negotiate), Goa (auction), and Louis XIV (majority control/auction). Maybe that's why I often think that Goa should have been an Alea game: it forms such a neat trilogy.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]

Pills. Pilling the cat has been one of the focuses of our lives lately. We got some steroids to give to Cobweb a few weeks ago, which will hopefully resolve her weight loss issues. And in the time since then we've gone down a path of increasing difficulty in getting Cobweb to take them.

At first we could just wrap a pill in a soft pill pocket and Cobweb would eat the whole thing. Then she started spitting out part of the pill, but still eating it when it was rewrapped. Then she just started licking the pill pocket off the pill. By that time I'd started give her the pills buried in wet food part of the time. That worked at first too, but after a few sessions she became adroit at eating every thing on the plate but the pill.

So it was down to hand-pilling the cat. It worked OK at first, then she started kicking with her back legs. Then we started pilling her with her lying on her back and after a session or two of that, she started trying to bat hands out of the way with her forepaws. Today we started wrapping her in a towel, and that worked, but we both knew that in a day or two Cobweb would find a way around that as well.

Fortunately, today our special-order pills from a "compound pharmacy" in Texas arrived. They've been made fully into treats and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully Cobweb will like them.

(Results several hours after this original writing suggest, "yes!" But we'll see if Cobweb figures out a way not to actually eat them in the next few days.)

Friday we take her to the vet to get weighed and see if all of this has made a difference.

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ReFi. So about the same time we noticed that Cobweb was getting skinny, we also noticed that our garage was falling down. It's always been a disaster, ever since we bought the house, but we hadn't noticed how unstable one of the walls had gotten until recently. At this point, a decent-sized quake would knock it right over, I suspect.

(Not that we ever get those in California.)

After considering some options, with the kind help of my step-mom Mary who knows such things, we started work on refinancing the house to take money out to rebuild the garage.

Right now, it's in a slightly obnoxious state. We've gotten approval. Simultaneously late last week the rates dropped to 5%, where we wanted them for this all to make financial sense. But, the underwriting isn't done, and our loan agent wasn't sure it'd be done within 15 days, so we couldn't lock the rate in. It's now back up to 5.125%.

Says Mary, ever the optimist, hopefully it'll be down to 5% again or even lower once our underwriting is done. We can but hope. On the bright side, I'll say that rates did drop to 5% within the month before we got started too, so last week's drop wasn't a one-time thing.

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Cards. So well I'm talking about things that are grabbing my attention, I should mention the thing that's grabbing my attention most at work nowadays: Cards. For the last several weeks I've been hard at work programming some general classes in Objective-C that will allow the easy manipulation of cards and their graphical display for use in card games.

The most immediate goal is to program Reiner Knizia's Money! for the iPhone, but I've scarcely got beyond the standard stuff thus far. I'm hoping that this first iteration of my card libraries will make it a lot easier to program card games in the future. In fact, I'm probably taking longer than is strictly necessary for this first game specifically to create well-abstracted classes.

We'll see how it goes ...

So, Fifth Avenue. And that's some nice weather we're having, isn't it?

If there was an Alea game which dropped straight off the RADAR, this was it. I think it's a very unapproachable game, but I also feel like it was developed pretty poorly, and that's a shocker coming from Alea.

The basic idea of the game is that you're trying to build up skyscrapers next to spaces with multiple businesses. You build skyscrapers by collecting cards (in 6 colors) then using them (1 color + the wild black at a time) to win auctions.

There's a lot of little stuff to like in the game. For example, the color you bid in also determines where you can build. Similarly the value of your highest value bid cards determines how many skyscrapers you can build (inversely; for higher value cards, you build less).

There's a lot to dislike too.

I think the game died because of its opaqueness. It's not obvious what to do and it's not obvious what the value of doing those things is. I also think that the game offers three different ways that players can play dramatically wrong--a topic that's of sufficient interest that I'm planning to write about it in two weeks at BoardGameNews in a little piece I'll call, "A Game Designer in Every Box."

But, it's just kind of an awkward and ugly game besides that. My favorite is the fact that you can take one of four actions each turn, intuitively called, "A", "B", "C", and "D". Each action is also split into three parts: first you do something notable, then you draw cards (with the type determined by the action column on the little chart), then you move a commissioner. This is where I think the development of the game really fell down. This morass should have been polished into something evocative and intuitive.

I think I've missed one of my plays of Fifth Avenue in my records, because I used to pull it out once a year to play it again and see if it made any sense. This last time, I felt like I might just have gotten an inkling of the game that the designer and developer saw. And, I think it might be an interesting one. But there's too much cruft to dig through to bother.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue C- (Plays: 3+)