Jan 01 2010

My Best Gaming Experiences of 2009

Category: Games — stephen @ 7:02 pm

Over the past year, I was given many oppor­tu­ni­ties to play board games with my fam­ily and with my excel­lent local game group. Of course, I wish I’d had even more chances, but I’m happy to have been afforded the time to pur­sue this quaint lit­tle hobby.

Look­ing back at 2009, I’d like to present (in no par­tic­u­lar order) the board games and card games that were part of my most pos­i­tive and/or mem­o­rable gam­ing expe­ri­ences of the year. Of course, my list­ing each of these games says just as much about the games them­selves as about the won­der­ful peo­ple they were played with, so your mileage may vary depend­ing upon the com­pany you keep.

Bat­tle Line

A two-player card game, pit­ting one army against another. There are 60 cards, num­bered 1 – 10 in six dif­fer­ent col­ors. The object is to cap­ture a flag by play­ing the best sequence of cards next to it. There are 9 flags in all, and the win­ner of the game is the player who man­ages to either take 3 flags in a row, or 5 total flags. My wife and I enjoy play­ing this one together, which says a lot because she’s not as big a fan of games as I am. It’s a short game, usu­ally tak­ing 15 – 20 min­utes to com­plete, and almost always below 30.

Tichu

Tichu is a trick-taking part­ner­ship card game that is best played with 4 play­ers. Other games in this genre are Euchre, Spades, Hearts, Bridge, and Rook. The most apt com­par­i­son to Tichu would be Rook on a cock­tail of E, acid, steroids, and mesca­line. Like Rook, Tichu requires a spe­cial­ized deck of cards rather than tra­di­tional play­ing cards. It’s very chal­leng­ing, yet not overly com­pli­cated or hard to learn, and an awful lot of fun. It’s an absolutely bril­liant game. Near perfect.

Race for the Galaxy (w/ expansions)

My nerdi­est friends love Race for the Galaxy. Why? Well, it’s San Juan with frickin’ laser beams. It’s got an eco­nomic sys­tem, a vic­tory points engine, a set col­lec­tion mechanic, and a double-think dynamic all in one neat pack­age. And it’s just a card game, no fid­dly bits required. I’ve played it nearly 100 times, thanks in part to the expan­sions and the excel­lent (and free) com­puter ver­sion I down­loaded, and it never gets old. Race achieves a depth of play and a level of replaya­bil­ity sel­dom seen in the game world.

Le Havre

Grab­bing my atten­tion early due to Agri­cola, its highly touted pre­de­ces­sor, Le Havre turned out to be a slow-churning, brain-burning, effi­ciency engine of a game. And I love it. There is so much to think about in this game, so many inter­est­ing deci­sions, dilem­mas, and prob­lems to solve. Although Le Havre is a longer game, the length seems appro­pri­ate given the com­plex­ity. With expe­ri­enced play­ers jock­ey­ing for the best actions, there can be some pun­ish­ing screwage, which makes for a tense and won­der­fully angst-filled gam­ing experience.

Chicago Express

This is the lav­ishly pro­duced Queen Games ver­sion of Wabash Can­non­ball, a railroad-themed stock mar­ket game, and it com­pletely caught me by sur­prise. I bought a copy of it purely because of word of mouth reviews. It’s short, tense, and sat­is­fy­ing from begin­ning to end. There is barely any down­time. The com­po­nents and board are beau­ti­ful. There is no ran­dom­ness at all — only player-generated chaos. For a game to be this good and yet be playable in 60 min­utes is sim­ply phenomenal.

Power Grid

I’d never played Power Grid before this past year, but I man­aged to get sev­eral plays of it in. The ver­dict: It stacks up, and is well-deserving of its lofty rep­u­ta­tion. Your goal, as an elec­tric util­ity com­pany, is to power the most cities at the end of the game. You have to build power plants, buy fuel to power your plants, and expand your net­work of cities on the map. Power Grid can be a lit­tle mathy and prone to induce analy­sis paral­y­sis, but I’ve been won over. I’m a big fan of its turn-order bal­anc­ing mechanic.

Steam

Steam is a vari­ant of the Age of Steam sys­tem. I’m not going to get into a long Steam vs. Age of Steam dis­cus­sion here, but I’m extremely happy that I opted for the for­mer. I per­son­ally don’t have the where­withal or the patience for the bru­tal and unfor­giv­ing AoS. The “Base Game” of Steam is quite excel­lent in its own right, and fills the “awe­some train game” void in my col­lec­tion nicely. As the owner of a rail­road com­pany, you spend the game build­ing track and deliv­er­ing goods to cities. It’s a top-tier game, and cer­tainly a brain-burner.

Brass

I’ve already writ­ten a review of Brass here, and from read­ing it, you are likely to con­clude that I am obvi­ously infat­u­ated with it and will play it any chance I get. And you would be 100% cor­rect. Brass is eas­ily in my all-time top 5. The game­play suc­cess­fully evokes the 19th-century Eng­lish indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion, and the real, work­ing econ­omy is tight as a drum. The turn-order bal­anc­ing mech­a­nism (he who spent the most goes last) is sim­ple, but effec­tive. Sorry, but I just love this game.

Star­craft: The Board Game (w/ expansion)

My good­ness, this thing is a beast. It’s by far the most mon­strous game in my entire col­lec­tion. I don’t often stray to the Amer­i­trash side of the gam­ing spec­trum, but I’m happy to own this one. Tons of bits, lots of rules, and plenty of strat­egy. The expan­sion adds a lot more depth and pol­ish to the sys­tem. The game can be on the long side, but time just flies while you’re play­ing. Star­craft: The Board Game, like its video game coun­ter­part, is like a knife fight. In a tele­phone booth. In space.

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization

I have a self-confessed weak­ness for civilization-building games. My favorite com­puter game, even after all this time, is Sid Meier’s Civ­i­liza­tion II. Through the Ages is based on that com­puter game, which in turn was based on Fran­cis Tresham’s Civ­i­liza­tion board game from the ‘80s. So it appears we have come full cir­cle, except that TtA is a much shorter game that doesn’t include a map at all. Instead, it focuses on the core mechan­ics of Civ II: the tech tree, sci­ence, food, pro­duc­tion, and mil­i­tary. Stripped down and abstracted in this way, it doesn’t make me miss the map one bit, and it’s one of my absolute favorites.

Mid­dle Earth Quest

Here we have a semi-cooperative game that pits sev­eral play­ers, rep­re­sent­ing the Free Peo­ples of Mid­dle Earth, against one player, play­ing the role of Sauron the Great. It’s unlike any other game I’ve ever played. It’s an immer­sive, expe­ri­en­tial game akin to (what I imag­ine might be) a really light­weight role-playing game. You roam Mid­dle Earth, embark­ing on quests and fight­ing the orc, while Sauron hatches plot after evil plot in his attempt to spread his influ­ence and cover the world in shadow.

Crib­bage

2009 was the year I was first intro­duced to Crib­bage, a card game which was cre­ated in the 1600’s. It’s rare for a tra­di­tional card game to play just as well with 2 as it does 3 or 4, but Crib­bage pulls it off well. It’s amaz­ing how tough the decision-making can be in this game, and try­ing to foil your oppo­nents’ plans weighs just as heav­ily as max­i­miz­ing your own gains. Crib­bage is appar­ently quite a pop­u­lar card game in the English-speaking world, but I haven’t per­son­ally met many peo­ple who know it.

Endeavor

The shin­ing new star for 2009 is Endeavor, a game I anx­iously antic­i­pated for about a year prior to its even­tual release. It didn’t dis­ap­point, and it plays in about an hour. As com­pet­ing Euro­pean pow­ers in the 18th cen­tury, play­ers must bal­ance their progress in build­ing, cul­ture, finance, and pol­i­tics as they attempt to col­o­nize the four cor­ners of the Earth. The colo­nial theme is quite abstracted, but it man­ages to shine through, and there is a healthy dose of player inter­ac­tion to keep every­one engaged for the duration.

Winner’s Cir­cle

The “dark horse” game of the year for me, if you’ll excuse the ter­ri­ble pun, was def­i­nitely Winner’s Cir­cle. A guy in my game group hap­pened to own a copy, and we had a total blast play­ing it. The basic gist of it is plac­ing bets on horses, then try­ing to influ­ence the race to the extent that your horse wins, places, or shows. On your turn, you roll a die, and you get to choose which horse moves. Each horse has par­tic­u­lar strengths and weak­nesses, depend­ing on what gets rolled. Oppor­tu­ni­ties abound for bluff­ing and screwage.

Mod­ern Art: The Card Game

My wife and I enjoy Mod­ern Art: The Card Game (or Mod­ern Art, sans auc­tions). I was very sur­prised to see how well the game worked with­out auc­tions, even to the point where I’m now unsure if I’d want to play the orig­i­nal rather than this ver­sion. The core of the game remains: col­lect as many paint­ings of the most valu­able artists as you can. Of course, the crux of the mat­ter is that you don’t know which artists will end up being valu­able, but you can attempt to influ­ence the bal­ance in your favor as you play.

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Aug 13 2009

WBC 2009

Category: Games — stephen @ 2:18 pm

I attended 2 days of this year’s World Boardgam­ing Cham­pi­onships in Lan­caster, PA. It’s not as pres­ti­gious as it sounds – while there are many tour­na­ments held there, any­one can come and have fun. I was much more inter­ested in open gam­ing than in com­pet­ing, though I did par­tic­i­pate in one tour­na­ment heat.

The BPA site is clum­sily designed and not very newbie-friendly, and it unfor­tu­nately mir­rors some of the WBC con­ven­tion expe­ri­ence itself (you are ini­tially con­fused and dis­ori­ented, but grad­u­ally learn to nav­i­gate the land­scape in spite of the many quirks). I joked about attend­ing mainly to “watch the old guys play wargames,” but it’s unde­ni­able that grog­nards are the WBC’s pri­mary demo­graphic. One look at the BPA logo might give you a hint in that direc­tion, but any dyed-in-the-wool boardgamer would also rec­og­nize the name of the BPA’s pres­i­dent, Don Green­wood: Mr. Avalon Hill him­self, designer of seem­ingly a thou­sand titles, among which resides Advanced Squad Leader, one of the most renowned wargame fran­chises ever published.

So, “Wargamers’ Mecca” is the most apt 2-word descrip­tion I can muster for the WBC — those guys were every­where! Thank­fully, there were plenty of other options avail­able for the less-hardcore among us. As I men­tioned, I mainly con­cen­trated on (casual) open gam­ing, and there was ample time and space allot­ted for that.

Day 1

I drove out to Lan­caster with fralim on Fri­day morn­ing. Upon arriv­ing, I met my pal Severus, and we imme­di­ately launched into a game of Race for the Galaxy with the new Rebels vs. Imperium expan­sion. Severus is quite the gam­ing savant who rou­tinely beats the pants off of every­one, and he won effort­lessly. We both went for mil­i­tary, but he pulled it off much bet­ter than I.

Upon explor­ing the open gam­ing library for a short game, we were dis­mayed at how generic the selec­tion was. As Severus was off to see a game demo, fralim and I even­tu­ally decided to play a teach­ing game of Notre Dame since fralim hadn’t played it before. He seemed to enjoy it, despite being strapped for cash and nearly over­whelmed by the rats sev­eral times.

I went to check out the ven­dors’ area, where I imme­di­ately snapped up a copy of Con­flict of Heroes: Storm of Steel from the Acad­emy Games table. fralim showed me a few of the finer points of the rules and strat­egy. This looks like a really cool game, and I’m not sorry to own both it and Com­bat Com­man­der: Europe. Same genre, but wholly dif­fer­ent approaches to gameplay.

After putting SoS back in its box, fralim real­ized we had about an hour before the Chicago Express tour­na­ment. He’d heard that the new Nar­row Guage & Erie Rail­road Com­pany expan­sion would be given away to all heat win­ners, so that was on his list of things to do. Our friend Prince­Ham­let arrived, and we tried out Fire & Axe, a very attrac­tive light strat­egy game about Vikings that was sur­pris­ingly civil (and also had very lit­tle to do with either fire or axes).

The Chicago Express heat was kind of sur­real. I had never played a board game com­pet­i­tively before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We were seated ran­domly, 4 to a table. My group­ing was pretty polite and well-mannered. The B&O com­pany launched out of the gates pretty early and was clearly going to beat the other lines to Chicago, so I sprung for a cou­ple shares of it. The next-highest line on the income track was Penn­syl­va­nia, which I also won a share in. That would have been enough to win me the game, but I wasted some pre­cious cash a share of Cen­tral, which resulted in a tie for first place between another player and myself. The tiebreaker to decide the win­ner? A die roll, which I won. Put an aster­isk next to my win if you must — the other guy def­i­nitely deserved it.

fralim, Prince­Ham­let, and I sat down to play our first-ever game of Star­craft: the Board Game with the Brood War expan­sion. Mer­ci­fully, one of the guys from Fortress Amer­i­trash swung by and helped us to grasp some of the rules. I played as the Arc­turus fac­tion of the Ter­ran race, fralim was Aldaris of the Pro­toss, and Prince­Ham­let chose to be the Zerg Over­mind. The game moved sur­pris­ingly fast despite its con­sid­er­able weight. Since attack­ers have a huge advan­tage over defend­ers, the game def­i­nitely pro­vides an incen­tive not to tur­tle. Despite this, Prince­Ham­let built up and built up, ready­ing his forces for the inevitable inva­sion as fralim and I rat­tled our sabres ner­vously. John had the spe­cial vic­tory con­di­tion that gave him vic­tory if he had 3 bases, but he only had 2, and his turtling Zer­glings were no match for the Bat­tle Cruiser and Wraiths I sent in to raze one of his bases. I ended up win­ning on vic­tory points, but mainly because we all played overly ten­ta­tively and defen­sively. We’ll get it right next time.

Severus and Prince­Ham­let went home for the night, and fralim and I were pretty fried, but we just had to play one more game: Thebes. He pretty much destroyed me.

Day 2

Sat­ur­day morn­ing began very ambi­tiously with fralim and I break­ing out Through the Ages. I began the game with Julius Cae­sar, while fralim took Homer as his leader. He took a siz­able lead in cul­ture dur­ing the first half of the game. After a while, though, my mil­i­tary started to push around his poets and artists, and ulti­mately just sat on them. I ended up draw­ing 3 War on Cul­ture cards when I had a strength advan­tage of 47 points. It def­i­nitely rein­forced the notion that you can’t afford to ignore mil­i­tary in this game.

fralim then taught me how to play Finca, a light set-collection game with an inge­nious lit­tle ron­del mechanic. I enjoy ron­del games, so that was a win. I may pick this one up at some point.

I had recently acquired a copy of Stephenson’s Rocket, and man­aged to get it to the table with Severus and fralim. Severus totally ran away with the game, owing mostly to the shrewd place­ment of his sta­tions. It’s def­i­nitely a game that I’ll have to play a few more times before I grok it. Only Knizia can make a set-collection game out of a train game. fralim called it “opaque,” not unlike Tigris & Euphrates, a game by the same designer which we later went to see demoed.

fralim had to leave, so Severus and I played his newly pur­chased spe­cial edi­tion of Cay­lus. The art­work and the metal coins are fan­tas­tic, but I have no prob­lem with the plain old reg­u­lar edi­tion. The bat­tle for con­trol of the provost is espe­cially tight in 2-player Cay­lus, and at one point, it was all the way back at the bridge! Amaz­ingly, I won the game by a sin­gle point, though I’m sure there’s a mar­gin of error con­sid­er­ing that it was Severus’ first play, and it had been a long time since my last Cay­lus game. We were unsure of whether a player’s sup­ply of houses is lim­ited, but lucky for me, it turns out that houses are unlim­ited. I built a pres­tige build­ing with my royal favor at game end.

I left to go home at that point, but Severus stayed to play in the semi-finals of the Race for the Galaxy tour­na­ment. He’d spent the whole week­end play­ing heats in order to qual­ify, and he ended up mak­ing it into the pool. Later that night he texted me to let me know he got 4th in the Final. Not too shabby!

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Jul 27 2009

Centered Container divs

Category: Markup & Style — stephen @ 9:27 am

There are two com­monly used meth­ods of set­ting up a cen­tered main wrap­per (or con­tainer) div ele­ment on your web­site. Usu­ally, a web page will reside in one big div, sit­ting just inside the body tags, like so:

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<html>
<head><title>My Site</title></head>
<body>
  <div id="container">
  ...
  </div>
</body>
</html>

This basic struc­ture makes it eas­ier to con­trol the page’s lay­out. By far, the most preva­lent method for styling the con­tainer looks a bit like the following:

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body {
  text-align: center;
}
 
#container {
  margin: 0 auto;
  text-align: left;
  width: 960px;
}

In line 6, the con­tainer div’s left and right mar­gins are set to auto and its width set to 960 pix­els. This is the basis for cen­ter­ing the div on the page. There is another approach, which I found a bit cooler until just recently.

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#container {
  left: 50%;
  margin-left: -480px;
  position: absolute;
  width: 960px;
}

This method doesn’t require giv­ing text-align:center to body and then over­rid­ing it imme­di­ately in the con­tainer div. I like that.

How­ever, a com­pli­ca­tion arrises when you want to put a back­ground image at the bot­tom of body; for exam­ple, a hor­i­zon­tal gra­di­ent. In this case, the best cross-browser way I’ve found to work is the first con­tainer cen­ter­ing method (using margin:0 auto). In addi­tion, the html and body tags will require some addi­tional styling to make it happen:

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html {
  height: auto !important;
  min-height: 100%;
}
* html {height:100%} /* IE6 */
 
body {
  background: url(/images/bg-footer.png) repeat-x bottom;
}

The body style is obvi­ous, but it’s impor­tant to man­age the height of the par­ent html ele­ment as well, remem­ber­ing of course that IE6 does not sup­port min-height. Inci­den­tally, it’s also IE6 that is respon­si­ble for the text-align:center that we applied to body.

In con­clu­sion, don’t use the absolutely-positioned approach for styling your con­tainer. It’s cooler, but it just isn’t as robust as the stan­dard auto-margin method because it breaks out of the page lay­out (specif­i­cally, its html par­ent). For adding any back­ground image to the bot­tom, now or in the future, that is bad behav­ior. Stick margin:0 auto on your con­tainer and be done with it.

Mar 23 2009

Game Review: Brass

Category: Games — stephen @ 10:24 am

brass-cover
Box Photo by Ben­jamin Pachner

Brass is a medium-weight strat­egy board game for 3 to 4 play­ers. It was designed by Mar­tin Wal­lace, and was first pub­lished in 2007 by War­frog Games in the UK. Since then, it has been dis­trib­uted in US, and to date, has enjoyed two suc­cess­ful reprints. The copy of the game used in this review is the first US edition.

Please note: This is just a gen­eral overview and review of the game, not a care­ful walk-through of the rules. There is plenty of in-depth dis­cus­sion of Brass in the forums at BoardGameGeek, if that’s what you’re after.

A brief rundown

In the game of Brass, you are an indus­tri­al­ist entre­pre­neur in 19th-century Lan­cashire, Eng­land. Your goal is to build cot­ton mills, coal mines, iron works, ports, ship­yards, canals, and rail­ways, each of which can be used by you (and the other play­ers) in some fash­ion to earn money and score points. Mean­while, the other play­ers are try­ing to do the same thing – it’s a race to see who can best take advan­tage of the economy.

Brass is one of those games that encour­ages you to plan out your actions ahead of time. In order to score, you have to build. In order to build, for exam­ple, not only must you have enough pounds to pay for the build­ing, but you often must have coal as well, and you’ll be pre­sented the choice of devel­op­ing your own coal mines, using some­one else’s mines (which gives them vic­tory points), or buy­ing coal at the mar­ket price.

One extremely cool aspect of the econ­omy in Brass is that play­ers influ­ence both demand and sup­ply. If there is a glut of coal on the board, then it can be had very cheaply. In a coal short­age, you’ll pay dearly for it (as well as raise the price for play­ers who buy after you). Of course, you can always build a coal mine to increase the sup­ply, thereby dri­ving the price down and earn­ing you income at the same time.

That was just one exam­ple. There is far more to Brass than I’m describ­ing here, but suf­fice it to say that it’s a deep, tense, sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence to play. More on that later.

brass-board
Photo by Geo

What’s in the box?

The phys­i­cal com­po­nents of Brass are amaz­ingly good, with one excep­tion which I’ll men­tion now: the coins. The coins are cat­e­gor­i­cally awful, noth­ing more than plas­tic tiddly-winks that are dif­fi­cult to stack, and have a propen­sity for slip­ping (and even fly­ing) all over the place. Throw them away, and use poker chips instead.

Now that the one truly neg­a­tive bit has been outed, I’ll focus on the over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive. First, the art­work is absolutely fan­tas­tic, very the­matic and evoca­tive of the period. The game board presents the rough geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion of each town fea­tured in the game, as well as sev­eral fla­vor illus­tra­tions. The cards are attrac­tive and quite useable.

brass-cards
Photo by Henk Rolle­man

The player col­ors (red, yel­low, green, pur­ple) are well cho­sen, and eas­ily dis­tin­guish­able. Each player receives his/her own set of hefty and well-printed build­ing tiles in his/her color. The wooden bits are quite ade­quate, as one might expect of any seri­ous Eurogame: black and orange cubes to rep­re­sent coal and iron, respectively.

brass-board-detail1
Photo by Geo

Lastly, I must admit that the rule­book, although well-set typo­graph­i­cally and attrac­tive graph­i­cally, is hor­ri­bly orga­nized. The rules aren’t sim­ple as it is, and the way the rules are orga­nized cer­tainly doesn’t make them any eas­ier. Thank­fully, there are resources avail­able on BoardGameGeek to help clar­ify the rulebook’s shortcomings.

How to play (in a nutshell)

Player order is not seat­ing order, as it is with most games. In Brass, the money play­ers spend is tracked, and the player that spent the least in the pre­vi­ous round is first player in the next round, second-lowest spender = 2nd player, and so on. Thus, the player order will most likely change from round to round. This is a really cool bal­anc­ing mech­a­nism that I wish more games had. You have to watch your spend­ing, because this will affect your order in the next round, and there­fore your choices of which spaces are left avail­able on the board (the early play­ers get first choice of the prime locations).

Another trick is that only the top tile on each of your per­sonal indus­try stacks is avail­able to be built. Typ­i­cally (but not always), the more reward­ing tiles are towards the bot­tom of each stack, so each player has to choose whether to build down through a par­tic­u­lar indus­try, or develop the indus­try (remove tiles off the top).

brass-tiles
Photo by Henk Rolleman

The game takes place over two Eras: the Canal Era and the Rail Era, respec­tively. You start with a hand of 8 cards, each of which con­tains either a loca­tion on the board (for exam­ple, the city of Man­ches­ter) or a type of indus­try (cot­ton, coal, iron, port, or ship­yard). Each turn, you will take 2 actions, dis­card a card for each action. At the end of your turn, you draw back up to 8 cards. An Era ends when all play­ers run out of cards (not when the deck is depleted).

As what to do for an action, you may do any of the fol­low­ing five things:

  • Take a loan (cash infusion)
  • Build a link between cities (canal or rail)
  • Build an indus­try in a city (cotton/coal/iron/port/shipyard)
  • Develop an indus­try (remove 1 – 2 tiles from the top of your stack(s))
  • Sell cot­ton (increase per-round income)

brass-flipped
Photo by Henk Rolleman

Here’s the rub: For an indus­try tile you’ve played to be any good, it needs to be used, or flipped. Cot­ton mills and ports can be flipped when a player sells cot­ton. Coal mine and iron works tiles are built with a cer­tain amount of coal or iron sit­ting on them, and get flipped when their respec­tive resources are depleted. When a tile is flipped, it is lit­er­ally turned upside down to reveal the per-round income it will earn you, and how many points it’s worth at scor­ing. You won’t get any income or points for your unflipped (unused) indus­tries, so only build what you think has a chance be used before the end of an Era.

A good rule of thumb is to try to build more of what other play­ers are build­ing less of. The demand will come, and the fewer play­ers you have to share that demand with, all the bet­ter for you!

Scor­ing points

At the end of each Era, there is a round of scor­ing. Play­ers get points for their flipped indus­try tiles and for their links to indus­tri­al­ized cities. After scor­ing the Canal (first) Era, all canal links and level 1 indus­try tiles are removed from the board, leav­ing a par­tially clean board for the begin­ning of the Rail Era.

Else­where

In the inter­est of (rel­a­tive) brevity, I won’t get into any more specifics about the rules here, but War­frog has a down­load­able PDF of the rules, as well as a FAQ page for those that are inter­ested in learn­ing more about how the game works. You’ll also want to check out the rewrit­ten rules on BoardGameGeek after see­ing the offi­cial ones! The BGG forums for Brass are another great resource if you have rules ques­tions, or just want to read what other peo­ple have to say about the game. Finally, BGG has a won­der­ful image gallery of peo­ple play­ing Brass, some of the play­ing pieces, etc. All of the images used in this review are cour­tesy of BGG users.

brass-board-detail2
Photo by Henk Rolleman

The Review

Brass is an absolutely bril­liant game, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to share my thoughts on it. It’s cer­tainly not a sim­ple game, and you’ll prob­a­bly play it wrong on your first attempt (as I did), but I’ve found it to be a true gem after sev­eral plays, and I don’t expect my opin­ion to change any­time soon. Brass shares much in com­mon with old-school rail­road games, but emerges as its own unique experience.

Play­ing Brass actu­ally makes me feel a bit like a 19th-century Eng­lish busi­ness­man. Wal­lace has clearly designed the game to be the­matic. Yes, there are some nig­gly rules excep­tions, but the mechan­ics of Brass are largely refined abstrac­tions of busi­ness processes from the period. Tak­ing into account the geo­graph­i­cal ele­ment, it’s amaz­ing how much com­plex­ity Wal­lace was able to dis­till into a really fun, and rel­a­tively sim­ple game. The game’s soul draws me in.

Brass can be quite con­tentious and cut­throat with 4 play­ers, and slightly less so with 3. With either num­ber, there will always be that deli­cious ten­sion between want­ing to increase your income, score more points, and posi­tion your­self to grab the prime loca­tions on the board, whilst try­ing not to run out of money or have your plans foiled by the other play­ers, all of whom are try­ing to do the same thing. There is a lot going on, and there will always be more you want to do than you are able to do – a sign of a solid and wor­thy game. I highly rec­om­mend Brass to those who like their games meaty and strate­gic, and who don’t mind using their first play or two of Brass to learn how to play it.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more of them from me, please let me know in the comments.

Sep 12 2008

Pin Your Footers The CSS Way

Category: Programming, Tutorials — stephen @ 7:59 am

I have been using a new CSS tech­nique for cre­at­ing fixed foot­ers – that is, foot­ers which pin them­selves to the bot­tom of the browser win­dow – with­out using JavaScript. Head­scape designer Ed Mer­ritt is the one who came up with the idea, and like most ele­gant solu­tions, this one is so sim­ple that I wish I’d thought of it. It really works.

Assum­ing your basic HTML lay­out markup looks like below:

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<div id="container">
  <div id="content"></div>
  <div id="footer"></div>
</div>

… you can use the fol­low­ing CSS exam­ple to pin your footer:

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#container {
  position:absolute;
  min-height:100%;
}
 
#content {
  margin-bottom:100px; /* same as footer height */
}
 
#footer {
  position:absolute;
  bottom:0;
  height:100px; /* same as content margin-bottom */
}

So, hack away. It’s not suit­able for every design, of course, but it just might help you get rid of that annoy­ing white­space below your footer, for instance on a content-starved page which ends up far short of the win­dow height.

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