I left home in morning before 7:00, got home at almost 5:00, then immediately left again (for game night), not to return till midnight. We had great fun playing games, but I’m exhausted now.

We played two games of Settlers of Catan — I won the first game, one of the other guys won the second game. Then we sat around talking about old computers games — that was a fun conversation. But I’m too worn out right now to go into it.

So here’s a couple pictures from the end of our Settlers games (to make up for not having pics for the last time I posted about game night), I was playing blue:

We used a random arrangement of the terrain pieces and numbers for the first game, but we used the standard set up for the second game. I think the random arrangement makes for a more interesting game.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Last night was my game night with my friends, somethin’ we hadn’t done in three weeks. Due to schedule conflicts and other Real Life stuff, we haven’t all sat down at a game table together in too long.

I brought a game the Grit family has played a few times, Blokus, and me and the guys gave it a real good work over. Blokus uses colored squares on a game board, and it’s real easy to learn the rules, but it’s a solid challenge to master. It requires the ability to see how the oddly shaped pieces can fit on the board together for you while using them to block the other players from placin’ their own. We played two games, and I won both — but I was the only one in our group who had played it before. The guys liked the game, and we’ll prob’bly play it again some time.

Next we got out Settlers of Catan. Settlers is a fantastically well designed board game. It’s an array of land features that produce various goods (lumber, ore, grain, etc.) determined by a random roll of two dice. The players use the goods to build roads and settlements on the map. We played it for well over an hour, and two of us came very close to winnin’ a few times until at last the other guy got what he needed to finish. Settlers has never failed to thoroughly entertain our group, and I would rank it in my top three favorite board games.

If you like puzzle games, give Blokus a try. If you like board games, try Settlers of Catan. Both are really great games that challenge experienced gamers and can be fun for the whole family.

I meant to take pictures of the end of our Blokus and Settlers games, but I completely forgot about it in the excitement of playing. It would have made for a better blog post.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Gary Gygax died yesterday. For those of you who don’t know the name, he was the co-creator of early Dungeons & Dragons, and the main driving force of the game for the first decade of it’s publication. Gygax and Dave Arneson created the initial concept of the game in the early 1970s (first published in 1974), but Gary wrote the majority of the game rules and books through about 1985. That work became the foundation for the whole role-playing game (RPG) genre and industry, including all the current computer RPGs like World of Warcraft. He was affectionately called the “Father of RPGs.”

He was a life-long gamer — a player of all kinds of games — and a prolific writer. He had a very creative mind, and from all I’ve ever read about him, was just a fun guy to sit at a table and roll dice with. He’s one of the very few celebrity-type people I’ve always wanted to meet, just to shake his hand and thank him for creating the hobby that excited me as a young teenager and entertained me into advanced adulthood.

He was 69 years old (35 at the first publication of D&D), and he was still playing and writing games right up till the end. I occasionally visit a D&D discussion forum where he participated, and his last post there was February 21, 2008. He even responded to some of my questions on that board (he responded to everyone’s questions).

Most everyone who knew of him knew he’d been having health problems through the last few years. And although we all realized, in the back of our minds, that he wouldn’t live forever, no long-time D&D gamer wanted to think about it. But now it’s happened. The father of our favorite pastime has moved up to the big game table in the sky. Salute, Gary — your works have given me decades of imaginative, fun times.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

We just got a book titled, The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, published 2007. I heard about this book many months ago, and I’ve wanted it, but I never remembered it when I was actually in a store or online where I could get it. It was always that thing in the back of my mind that I only remembered at useless times. And then Cowgrit’s mother surprised us with it.

It’s a big book of stuff for boys. How to tie a knot, how to fold a paper airplane, interesting history and stories, and all kinds of stuff that interests and intrigues boys. (Sure, some girls probably like this stuff too.) There’s a ton of various information in this large tome — too much for me to go into for a blog post. I’m just going to talk about one page in the book.

This book includes a page on Role-Playing Games. I think this is very cool. I agree that RPGs are something boys would like (they’re all about adventure and excitement), and RPGs have many good features.

The authors say, “It is a training ground for imagination,” “it is a social game,” and:

This is all very true. But some of the things the authors say show they didn’t do any research about the subject. They seemed to write the page based solely on their memories. They say, it “was put together in 1972.” But the first version was initially published in 1974.

And then they mention the characters you can play, “Fighter, Thief, and Magic-user.” But the thief and magic-user names haven’t been used in the game for 19 years, since 1989.

They say, “we progressed from Basic to Advanced to Expert to Immortal levels….” But that’s a non-sense “progression,” mixing two different versions of the game from 22 years ago, 1986. (For the D&D pedants in my audience: I know you could “progress” from Basic to Advanced, but you didn’t normally progress from Advanced to Expert or from Expert to Immortal.)

I know it may sound like I’m being pedantic, myself, in making these observations. And maybe I am. But the above items will make no sense to most young boys, or dads, who play or want to play Dungeons & Dragons today. The terms “Basic,” “Advanced,” “thief,” or “magic-user” have not been used in D&D for a couple decades. Why didn’t the authors check out the contemporary version? It’s not like it’s hard to find or pick up.

What these authors have done in this chapter of the book is like using the terms “floppy disk,” “kilobytes,” “ASCII,” and “Zork” when talking about computer games. These terms are out of date and would only confuse an audience of young boys in today’s computer world.

This lack of basic research for a chapter in an instructional book puts doubt in my mind about everything else in the book. Is the information on dinosaurs, bugs, and astronomy similarly out of date and unresearched?

But then, the “chapter” on role-playing games is only two-thirds of a page long — the shortest chapter I’ve so far read. Maybe including it was an after-thought they considered unworthy of actual research.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com