Fortress: Ameritrash Blog

New game discoveries: Napoleon's Triumph: I played this twice and I'm captivated. It's a very nice balance of fluidity and constraint. It is very tense. It's very hard to figure out a strategy in the game at first, but things are slowly opening up. I am very new to wargames, and I have this comment: mein Gott is conflict simulation cool! It's like this boardgame is not a boardgame: when I play NT, I think about the historical battle rather than this thing made of cardboard and wood. I've got a few more games of this lined up...

The hardest part about running the store is trying to keep in-check, always trying to make the right decisions. Unfortunately, the right decision isn't always to keep to. The reason for these thoughts are the number of empty retail stores in downtown Vancouver.  I keep on seeing them and thinking 'wow, that would make a great retail location for us'.  Heck, in the last six months, I've noticed the increasing number of empty retail stores and watched the rents asked for in Craigslist drop slowly.  The fact is, the economy around here is finally tanking.  I know...

I've been lucky to have one or more regular opponents for face-to-face gaming, so the lure of online tools such as VASSAL and Cyberboard never rose to the level where I'd actually use these applications. Our recent experiments with online gaming have revealed a painful truth: from a usability perspective, these tools both blow and suck (to borrow a Bart Simpson-ism). The design principles of yesterday, for tomorrow!I've worked in the software industry for a long time, so I've seen the best and the worst of UI design. I've also seen the overall quality of UIs improve over...

Luck seems to be a key thing for many games I like. Am I an exceptionally lucky person? Maybe? 'Dice like me'.   People who don't like the luck element often think (to my eyes) that it gets in the way of the (presumed Superior) skills. I'm actually not especially competitive, or skilled. I don't read guides to games, I don't research the best moves. Perhaps my role in things is to give those 'better' game players someone to beat. I'm ok with that.   A  gamer friend of mine is very unlucky. He...

Sagrilarius put some interesting questions in his blog " The Culture of Gaming, and Vice Versa" last week. I was struck especially by one point he made, in that "western" society doesn't accept hierarchical games. " Games with binding contracts or hierarchical player roles are simply unheard of in the genre, not because they aren't fundamentally sound, but because they simply don't occur to the usual suspects that drive boardgaming's technological progress. Not just a eurogame thing, this a western game thing." Not to leave my thought in the comments section,...