Uomo Donna coming up!

This weekend is one of Tucson's 2 annual co-ed frisbee tournaments, so I've assembled a team again. It's largely the same team from Hoasis and last year's Uomo Donna.

I've been drafting many of my Hoasis/UD players onto my league teams lately, so we play together every week. We've been almost undefeated at league the last couple seasons, which is cool, and I hope to see a good performance out of us this weekend!

Yesterday I had a team BBQ at my house, and some of the team came by to eat brats, burgers, and chicken, hang out, and even play some games. In fact, the first people who arrived were 2 of the girls from the college women's B team, and without my saying anything about it they asked if they could play a game! I ended up teaching them Puerto Rico, which they seemed to like. They want me to let them know when I'm having people over for games in the future!

I also played a different game with Nick and his 2 friends from Ohio, and there was a lot of Guitar Hero going on as well. The food all came out good, and it was an all around awesome BBQ.

Big Birthday Weekend - on the SedjCon schedule?

I have had a lot of fun this weekend, what with my birthday BBQ and all. So much so that I think I might try and arrange this type of thing again next year. Maybe the "Big Birthday Weekend" should be added to the SedjCon schedule, which thus far currently consists only of my Holiday Game Party around Xmas time. Here's what transpired...

Friday:
Baked cookies and cake
Played games with friends from +/- 6pm-midnight

Saturday:
Disc Golf
15 friends came over for BBQ and games including Guitar Hero, Katamari Damacy, Race for the Galaxy, Pandemic, Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence, In the Year of the Dragon, Louis XIV, Railroad Tycoon, Goa, and Leonardo Da Vinci

And tomorrow I'm having dinner with my parents and grandma :)

What a fun weekend!

Life is hectic this time of year (and Rock Band is pretty cool)

I may have mentioned, I love this time of year. It's like a big 2 month holiday. I fill up my time with a lot of close friends, and I do a lot of fun stuff. Sometimes there's so much to do and so many people to do it with, I actually get overbooked! That's a great problem to have for someone who usually feels like they haven't got a lot of friends...

I've been busy, as usual - too busy even to blog about it! My Holiday Game Party was a blast, I got to spend a lot of time with Luke and Steve while they were in town, and it's not even over yet! Jeremy and Amelia, Mohan, and Aaron are still around, and I even got to spend some time with Mikey when his wife and kids went up to Phoenix for a few days.

Last night we had a lot of fun playing Rock Band for 4 or 5 hours - Jeremy got it for Christmas and brought it over. Rock Band is pretty cool. Drums are hard. Singing is easier than Karaoke Revolution. Guitar is easier than Guitar Hero 3, but is still not super easy. I expect we'll play a lot more Rock Band before Jeremy leaves town again. I heard it came out for PS2 after all, so I might splurge and pay the $170 or whatever for it.

And now I'm off for more fun and games!

Holiday Game Party

I love the holiday season for a number of reasons. things are often laid back at work, people are generally in a holiday mood, and many of my friends are back in town for Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year.

For the past few years I've had a big-ish holiday game party the day after Christmas with board games, a poker tournament, and other assorted fun and games. This year Christmas day falls on a Tuesday, so due to the Tuesdayness of the holiday, this year's game party will be the weekend before.

The party is generally (or was originally) an all night thing, and it feels almost like a mini-convention. This year I'm trying to be just a little bit structured about things. The poker tournament seemed popular before, and I like it as a chance to play poker for a prize without having to put up actual money, so I'm going to do that again. I'm scheduling that for sure. I'm going to try and schedule some Werewolf and/or Time's Up! for late Saturday night, and there's a fun party-ish game that I've never actually tried called 1000 Blank White Cards which I think I'll try and schedule as well. Those are all fun party games for late night... during the day I hope to play more strategy games. Maybe since it's a long party I'll play some longer games I don't normally get to, like Warrior Knights or the new Starcraft board game!

There may well be Guitar Hero and/or Karaoke as well :)

Since it amuses me, there will be prizes for the Poker tournament as well as the following categories:

• Most games played
  
• Most unique games played
  
• Most games won
  
• Most unique games won
  
• Most hardcore - most hours spent at the party!

The first year I kept track of everyone who came, about how long they were there, what games they played, who won each, and I actually did have a prize for the winningest players... myself not included... I have an unfair advantage, being there the whole time while other people might leave and come back. I hope this year it's at least as much fun as previous years :)

Christmas in November?

No one outside the Jewish community really knows when Hanukkah is, so maybe it's fine if this year it started on Friday. Besides, Christmas starts the day after Thanksgiving, doesn't it? I mean I heard Christmas music in the grocery store on November 19th this year!

Friday my friend Jeremy (who lives in Oregon) came over and we played a little Magic. He also brought his Xbox 360 and Guitar Hero 3, but we didn't have a second controller so I said "screw it, let's go to Best Buy I'll get GH3 for PS2," which I'd been thinking about doing for a while anyway. We went, and Jeremy even bought it for me for Hanukkah, which was cool.

While we were over there we went to Game Daze to see if they had any of the new stuff. I figured they wouldn't, but I was sad I hadn't brought anything new home from the convention last week. It turned out they had one copy of Cuba and one copy of Race for the Galaxy - these were two of the games I was most interested in from Essen. I played each at the convention and didn't love them to death, but now I felt like I wanted to play them. They had a sale going on that day only where you get 25% off everything if you spend over $75, so I got both games as well as Lost Cities for Jeremy and his girlfriend. He had said he was looking for a good 2 player game to play with Amelia, and Lost Cities is always a big hit.

So I played GH3 a lot on Friday, as well as 2 games of RftG with Nate and my friend Winton who stopped by on his way into town.

Saturday was my game club's Family Game Day at Bookman's - I played games ALL DAY LONG. I played RftG, Railroad Tycoon, 2 games of Cuba, and then another 2 games of RftG to close out the night as Bookman's staff was kicking us out the door.

After that Jeremy and I went back to my house, we played another game of Magic, and my friends Anita and Ryan showed up. They played some Guitar Hero, then we designed T-shirts for the frisbee tournament coming up this weekend.

So the reason this post started off talking about Christmas in November is because I feel like the proverbial kid at Christmas with all my new toys... Guitar Hero 3, Cuba, Race for the Galaxy, and a pre-order of Agricola (my grandma's Hanukkah present to me), the new game that came out this year that everyone is raving about (it's in German though, the English version that I pre-ordered will be out around April).

Back from the game convention

I had a great time last week at BGG.con, an annual board game convention I've been going to for 3 years now. It's a ton of fun, and a great excuse to see my childhood friend Brian (who's now got a 2nd son!) and a lot of other friends from across the country. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a quick list off the top of my head of friends I only see a couple times a year, usually at these conventions (in no particular order). I'm sure I'll miss a bunch:

Brian, Edward, Aldie from Dallas
Peter and Julie from Seattle
Steph, Chris, Mike, Shannon, Lincoln, Nikki, Eric, Erin, and Aaron from L.A.
John from Tucson (yes, Tucson... he never leaves his home so I only see him in Dallas!)
Chris (ceej) from NorCal
Derk from New York
Winton from Prescott

And new friends who I've seen or met before but only barely:
Simon from DC
Justin from Ithaca
Zev from New York
Mischa from New Orleans
Judson from L.A.
Ravindra from North Carolina

And this ignores all the people I know online but seldom actually see:
Dan and Kelly from Texas,
Chester - who might be moving to Tucson
Gil and Morgan from New York

And I'm sure I've missed someone, if not several people.

At the convention I managed to play a lot of games, including the 4 new ones that were at the top of the list (of new games I really wanted to play). I even played some Guitar Hero 3 finally. Stephanie humored me with a Pro Face Off (Freebird on Hard of course). I did miserably (266k), and she's gotten even better(360k).

I also talked to a publisher about some of my games, and he took one of them home with him to test out. He said I could send the other 2 I was showing him as well. I met another publisher there, but never seemed to find the time to meet with him about my games. I asked if I could email him about them and of course he said "OK" to that. I guess I'll see what he says after reading about the games!

And finally, I made some real headway getting prototypes noticed/played at the convention - mine as well as other peoples' games. I had posted a sort of "sign up sheet" online beforehand to solicit interest, and I wanted to make a little sign so people would know where to look for that kind of thing. John Theys did me one better by making a decent sign, and then posting it all over the convention! It had my avatar on it so people would know who to look for...



I was surprised at how many people were actually interested in playing my games, and there was very positive feedback all around for the most part. I approached it more like demo-ing the games rather than playtesting and looking for feedback. I mean I would happily take feedback, but I didn't want to give the impression that these games are unfinished, just unpublished. I have several games that I think are really done except for whatever minor tweaks a publisher might request, and I think people would be more willing to play a game if they thought it wasn't still brand new and in need of work. I didn't think the interest level would be so high, I hope I didn't disppoint too badly when scheduled games didn't happen (that often is the case at these kinds of conventions)! next year the Unpublished Game portion of the con will be much better organized, if I have anything to say about it! Which... I probably do, as I'm the one who's doing all the spearheading of this stuff anyway :)

I'll be posting a long recounting of my trip, maybe broken up day by day, but that will take a while and I wanted to put up something about my fun trip before it was old news. It seems a lot more people are reading my blog now, so I hope it's a good read!

- Seth

New personal best score on Freebird

I just scored 303,408 points on Freebird on hard... we're still talking Guitar Hero 2 here - unlike some of my friends, I have not yet bought GH3 on PS2, nor have I bought an Xbox360 3 days later to play online.

I felt like I had a really good start, but then I missed a hammer-on late in the pre-solo ("easy") part, which means I missed a couple notes right after that too. I missed like 2 other notes pre-solo, but went into the solo with a decent score, like 120k or so I think.

I did really well on most of the solo parts that I normally do well on, but I did crappy on a couple as well, so I think I could get more points than 303k. I'll have to try again soon.

The best part might be that I wasn't pro-faceoff-ing with Nate, I was playing by myself, which means the game actually recorded the score in the High Scores thing.

Guitar Hero skillz improving

I haven't played Guitar Hero since last weekend, but more importantly I haven't played Freebird on Hard in a couple weeks. Nate came over tonight and we started and ended the night with Freebird (pro faceoff)...

The first game I felt I did pretty mediocre-ly, and Nate kicked my ass - by a whole 1,000 points or something (the joke, for those not familiar with GH, is that 1,000 points is nothing). The last game though I did really well. I'm still missing notes on the 'easy' first half (6 of them in fact), but I bested my current high score - I got 251k! Unfortunately in Pro Faceoff mode it doesn't appear to record the high score, but the point is that I'm getting better. If I can just perfect that pre-solo part, then the next goal will be 275k points, which I hope to hit quickly and move on to a goal of 300k.

Stephanie had better watch out... maybe not by November, but by the next time I see her after that I think I'll be able to giver her a run for her money!

Edit: Since this post I have improved my high score to 288k, and I consistently break 260k.