Extra hour

With the extra hour of daylight savings, we enjoyed a wild and crazy game of Agricola. Still the house favorite, as far as board games go.

This, using the variant in which each player picks 10 cards and keeps 7 for play, rather than the standard 'draw 7 and eat them'.

Economy of scale

Anyone [1] who hadn't already heard of Spore will after reading today's XKCD. "It looks brilliant," reports a self-identified addict of sandbox games. Coincidentally, the increasedly-having-been-misnamed [2] Sim City series of games already spanned many such orders of magnitude [3]; IIRC, one of the sequels expanded from cities to interconnected cities. There was an early knockoff called "Sim Earth", and a miniature version in "Sim Ant"? Furthermore, I've long suggested that an MMG consisting of many Sims, a few Sim Cities all within a giant game of Civilization would make for a good time. The thousands of players removed from the game when Vladivostok gets knocked off the map by a top-level schmuck arbitrarily razing cities for a few more civilization points at the end of the game will offer an instructive allegory to our often tacit support of our presumed representatives' warmongering ways.

If the moral remains translucent, we could try Nuclear War instead of Civ.

Anyway, I hope Spore sells like hotcakes, so someone I know tires of it and passes it along. After I graduate, of course.

[1] Always defined as the set S of people who are likely to read this post; Pr([Reads XKCD]S)~=1.
[2] Ouch. How do I quote Douglas Adams' description of The Trilogy, in the past tense?
[3] Ah, I see now that Will Wright is behind all of this. And, according to Wikipedia, it all sprung from his map generator for Raid on Bungling Bay. Will Wright for Hegemon!

Funkenschlag

Actually, we have the English version of the title game, called Power Grid (but Funkenschlag is a much catchier post title).

Here's the idea: players compete for scarce cities (up to 3 players may occupy a city; any players network of cities must be contiguous), scarce power plants (there are always enough available, but some are better than others) and scarce resources (whose cost changes with availability: e.g. as coal becomes more popular, it also becomes more expensive). A player with a good combination of resources, cities and power plants can make more money, which is used to purchase more of all three in the next round. The only random facet of the game is order of power plants in the face-down stack, but everything else is open and nicely deterministic. [*]

I think a graphical representation of the mathematical model for this game would make nice art.

I thought a simple plot of the bankrolls of each of two players in a two-player contest would give some insight into the game's progress and eventual outcome, but it does not. I'll try again when we put together a 5-player contest.



[*] Except for the unpredictable economic choices of follow contestants: ahh, the bane of economists everywhere!