Try a new Google feature out... decide it's not for me...

And I can't undo it?

I actually looked at Ask.com and Dogpile.com for the first time in years because of SearchWiki.  I'm sure it's a great idea and I might like it later on, but let me turn the thing off.  I shouldn't have to create another google profile just to view pages without x's, clouds and extra arrows all over the place.  Looks like a playbook.

Don't foist things on your users.  Let them come to you.  That's what made Google a great hub.  

BindleRails, or PocketRails as I originally dubbed it, will be available for print-and-play by the end of this week.  The rules need fully written and I need to shoot some pictures and design some basic art, but initial play testing has been promising.

A quick blurry snapshot of the prototype game components are below.  The game has elements of some of my favorite games (card/goal management from Ticket To Ride, stock manipulation from 1830, general mechanics and technology interaction from PocketCiv and route building from Rail Baron).  The version pictured below can be downloaded as a PDF and printed on about 5 or 6 sheets of Avery business cards (2 x 3-1/2) stock or regular card stock.  Some spare change for markers is all that is needed once you're set up.  The initial set of cards will be black and white only.

 

A "bindle-sized" version of the game will also be available to set up play mats and/or a more conventional map of the routes and companies used in the game.  I would also like toset up various scenarios or other railroading/route combinations and other technologies if there is interest.

To the right........ Decktet and an old dice one!  

 

Enjoy!

I'm playtesting some ideas for a game of train routing and resources borrowing heavily from the Pocket Civ model.  Rules and PDF's will be up as soon as I iron out some wrinkles.

I cut out Micropul and played it the other day... solo, it's an okay game, good to print and play and try out.  The online ones are also pretty good to keep track things.

In terms of game play, it is pretty easy to pick up.  The choices are okay to pick from.  Not too deep, not too much brain drain.

 

While we're at it, my test project for graphic drawing based on the oldie 'Choice'...

 

Minimalist...  It could use a nice looking toolbar across instead of the boring old Windows menu, but the game's rules are coded.  I will be posting this one soon as well.  Not much to it.

I need to clear this by the author, but at least for my own personal programming fix, it was just right.  

This was built with VB.Net and works with XP and 2000... Screenshot below this one is from Mono 1.9.1 in Ubuntu in a Sun Virtual Box.  

And now the Linux....

 

Overall, looks pretty good.  Button text/alignment stuff, but not bad.  If it is okayed by the Decktet creator, a link will be placed on the right side to grab your own copy.

EDIT:  Forgot to mention... the extended cards can be selected, as well as rules for scoring diagonally and allowing the variant to allow flushes to be scored as well.

Also while out, I was looking for materials to build my own Election card game on paper before computerizing it even more.  I ended up hitting a teacher's supply store and I bought a package of blank dice and a 1,000 pack of 2 x 4 index cards.  

In the meantime, I ran across the web page for Decktet from http://felbrigg.blogspot.com/2008/10/holiday-games.html in part of my travels.  I was delighted at the artwork and the idea of a smaller deck with double trump on most of the cards intrigued me.  

Again, my first-grader and I put together the cards on the 2 x 4 index cards by printing out the PDF of cards at 75%.  After cutting and pasting, we made a deck.  It seemed a little flimsy and didn't look like it was going to hold up well.  

So, to the store again, this time to K-Mart to get some top-loading card protectors.  Last night, kid and I cut out more cards, this time at 100%.  We put them in the tuck cases and created the deck.  The good news is, they are more durable.  Bad news is, they are thick and the corners still aren't round.  Translation:  Ain't the easiest thing to shuffle.  Even at a meager 30-36 cards, it feels like you're trying to mix up a deck of glued together Uno cards.

Undeterred, I went about going through some of the rules made for the Decktet games.  I gravitated toward Quincunx, but found that there was no solitaire variant.  

The solitaire player version I whipped up is:
- No extra cards.
- A 4 x 4 grid, initial placement of cards at the corners.
- 10 cards dealt.
- No scoring diagonally for anything.
- If you run out of the cards and there are open spaces in the grid, you automatically lose.

All the other rules apply.  With this variant, you are forced at some point to pull some 11's and 21's to fill in the grid.  You have a fair amount of control over how you want to stack your cards, but you are more at the whim of what's in the deck versus what an opponent could do to make your life hell.

I had a blast with it and the plastic cards were bigger, substantial and gave it a more polished feel.  The art, again, was great to look at.  The game itself is a brain-burner in terms of all the different ways you can play a card and do the scoring.  I'm sure some strategies will develop, but it is a very engaging solitaire game.

I would like to try Jacynth tonight (SimCity CCG without all the counting - yay!), but I think Turtle Butt is in order with the kids just on name alone, but it looks like it would be a lot of fun.  The rules are simple enough, and if they can handle Yahtzee with straights, pairs and combinations, they can handle Turtle Butt.  :-)

Last couple weeks have been spent relaxing and playing other games in my spare time.  I haven't done too much development on  any computer games and job #1 has been keeping me busy enough that I haven't had the urge to code when I get home.

Over the weekend, I chanced upon a copy of StreetCar from Mayfair Games.  I didn't realize it was a mid '90's game.  I had been looking at it for a while, but I didn't want to plop down $30 for it.  This time in the gaming shop, however, it was marked half off so it came back with me.

I took it home and played it (wrong) with my 6-year-old later that night.  The bits are a bit flimsy and tend to move too much if you are doing upgrades on the board.  The rules are fairly well written, although there are a couple places they could have been cleaned up.  The examples were helpful.

In terms of mechanics, it strikes me as a cross between 1830's track laying (with squares and no bonuses) paired up with the baron-returning-home round of Rail Baron - Essentially, the two gimmicks I can't stand the most in two games I have great respect for.  

So we began, my kid and I.  We played it so that you started from one of your terminals to two of your destinations and then had to come back home again - no need to go across the board.  That didn't take too long.  It was fun.  She went and got cleaned up for the night and I realized after that game that we were supposed to end up on the other side of the board.  

So, we agreed to play again, this time with the requirement of going across the board.  Our game took damn near an hour to finish and she was frustrated because the track layout ended up being extremely complex and hard to trace.  

There is definitely an element of screwage and I can't imagine playing this game with more than three people.  I'm anxious to have my wife try it out, as she is a Tulane alumnus and has fond memories of her old town.  We'll see if this one works for her.  

In terms of strategy, it's similar to Carcasonne and other tile playing games.  You get what you get.  In Carcasonne, you can at least play bits down for points later - this is absent in StreetCar, but to be fair, Carcasonne came out years later.  Basically, you're trying to see who can sneak across the board and you hope that you can remain flexible enough to figure out some sort of convoluted path to victory.  In short, it's light, but that's okay, particularly for a $15 game.  

My rating, three stars [***] with variants and provisos out of five.  It will get played because I like trains and this is a game I can convince members of my family to play, but we'll see if it holds up.

An old dice game by Steve Jackson.  I've tinkered with it for a while and played with the Java applet version of it as well.  I figured I'd do a quick .Net version of it and I should have it up within a week or so.  I'm tinkering with a library to encompass all my 2D drawing stuff, and this was a trial project for that.

The game, for those interested, can be found here.