The Mine Shaft Gap

tMSG turned three years old last month. And so I have some statistics to report, for the period Oct 7, 2007 through to Oct 6, 2008 inclusive:

• Total posts for this period: 56. This is down from last year (68), but this is largely because I reduced my Sunday night gaming, and therefore reporting, to an average of about 3 sessions per month since about July or August.
• Total no. game plays reported*: 387. This is actually up on last year’s number (from 362), which implies that collectively we are playing more games per session, and therefore also probably shorter games on average.
• Total no. unique games played: 203. (last year: 210 - probably not statistically different).
• No. unique, regular game players: 20^ (last year: 19).
• Approx. no. game hours: 290 (last year: 271).
  (ie., if you laid end-to-end all the games recorded in the last year, it would add up to 12.1 days continuous (last year: 11.3). But, only 76.5% of all games logged had the time recorded, so extrapolating the average would give 379 hours, or 15.8 days, for the 387 games reported.)
• Additional amount of time spent separately in rules explanation and game setup*: 49.4 hours (last year: 34.5).
  Total number of individual gaming experiences: 1493 (last year: 1540, so down a bit, but again there are a bunch of sessions not recorded, which certainly would have pushed the number way past this. As before, one gaming experience is one person playing one game. A 4p game is therefore 4 individual gaming experiences.)

(* As for last year, these data are from recorded game sessions only with the vast majority having me in attendance. There are obviously many more game plays of the group in this time that have not been captured.)

(^ A unique, regular player is defined as an attendee to Sunday night sessions who turned up more than once in the 12 month period. With visitors, who attended a single session only within that period, the number is increased by another 9 to 29. Last year I reported 32, but this was skewed by counting game opponents at the Albury expo, who arguably shouldn’t be included in the number, and this year were not. ie., the 9 ‘visitors’ actually participated in a ‘typical’ Sunday night session.)

Last year I also reported some web site traffic statistics, so here’s some comparative data. Over the past month the average no. site visits per day has been 15 (last Sept-Oct: 10.8), with an average of 4.31 pages per visit (last year:1.65), for a total of 2000 pageviews (last year: 536). This number is a little skewed, with a lot of traffic coming from one or a few sites in Auckland, New Zealand. Hi, Auckland…!

A better view is to look over a nine month period, as I reported last year. So over the past nine months, the total has been 3957 visits, for an average of 14.5 visits per day. 30.4% of these were from Australia, 23.4% from North America (20.6% from USA, ~3% from Canada), 20% from New Zealand (hi again, Auckland!), and 17.2% from Europe incl. all the eastern bloc countries.
This compares to the nine months to Oct 2007: 9.5 visits per day, with 46.4% from Australia, 31.9% from North America, and 16.3% from Europe.
Also as I reported last year, there are repeat visits from a large number of countries, over 30 in fact. Some of these are from places in Mexico, Israel, Sweden, Japan, and Ecuador. Last year I mentioned Hungary, Singapore, India, Brazil, and Peru, and all of these are in the mix this year too (although my visits from Peru were unique this time rather than ‘returners’).

The gaming-related highlights for the past year include our 3rd annual ConTrail weekend (especially that game of Brass we started at 1:35am - thanks again to the heroic participation of Craig and Neil M.).
There was also the Australian Games Expo at Albury - my second one of these, and this year I went with my whole family. Again, so many highlights, like catching up with Melissa and Fraser and the Z-Man, and other gaming personalities I met in ‘07 such as Giles P. and Neil T. The Boardgames Australia team also made themselves known to the world, announcing their inaugural winners, including Phil H. (Adventureland) with the Archaeology card game, who has since made it ’round for one Sunday night session with us. I hope to do it all again in ‘09, notwithstanding there is a generous chunk of 2008 still left…

Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Pat, Alex, Jeff, Richard, Brian, Neil M., Neil F., Paula, Paul.
Played: Coda, BattleLore, Dancing Dice, Space Alert x 4, Volle Wolle, Ice Flow, Ice Flow (again), Space Alert (again), Volle Wolle (again), Stop Go, Nobody but Us Chickens.

Neil was back from his family trip to Europe, including Essen, carrying a bunch of new stuff from there. Space Alert was the most popular title tonight, although two other lighter games were played twice each too. Le Havre, ‘Australian Edition’, was also in the box and captured a few eyeballs, although this one will have to wait for another night to draw breath.

Brian also posted in some of his own commentary for tonight, and I have annotated the relevant entries here with his observations highlighted in blue like so…
With the hype of the imminent US election in the news, Brian also draws our attention to this: Move to Canada. I’m not sure which game it applies to, though.

Coda: Pre-dinner waiting game, with Paula joining in for the first time.
3 mins rules and setup; 12 mins game time.
Pat eliminated, Paula revealed her tiles! Alex therefore probably won, although shouldn’t have – the closer shot of the two shown here shows at an early stage of the game Alex’s two blank tiles revealed…!

BattleLore: On any other night this game might have received more attention.
About 30 mins. Don’t know who won out of Alex and Jeff.

Dancing Dice: Filler while waiting for Neil F. This plays like a cut-down Yahtzee variant with count-down to elimination. The novelty is the dice pips are little footprints made to resemble dance step instructions.
5 mins rules and setup; 15 mins game time.
Results: Richard won, against Brian, Neil M., Pat and Paul.
Brian: Richard demonstrated that those long hours studying Fred Astair, Gene Kelly and Shirley Temple have truly paid off. He danced the night away, using the safety of rock dancing, sashaying his dice in ways that none of us could match. Pat also showed us a few moves, which proves he should no longer be known as ‘Security Officer Mr. Grumpy’, but as ‘The New John Travolta!’ For the rest of us, we struggled to keep pace, tripping on our shoelaces, tapping out of time, scoring low consistently, and eliminated early. An enjoyable competition, although with the same intellectual depth of ‘Dancing with the Stars’.

Space Alert: The highlight of the night, started on the other table. More about this below in the context of the session I played in…
Setup, rules explan and 4 games played over a period of 2hrs and 15 mins.
Neil F., Neil M., Brian, Pat and Richard collectively won twice and lost twice.
Brian: Why is it that every time we go out into space, someone starts shooting at us? What did we do to deserve this sort of harassment? Stressful chaos.

Volle Wolle: Another new one from Neil F. brought back from Essen. This is just a little game, which we picked as an alternative to Space Alert because a) it contained sheep, and b) we were led to believe by the Space Alerters that they’d only be about half an hour before changing tables! :-)
10 mins rules & setup; 37 mins game time.
Results: Alex: 68. Paul: 56. Jeff: 46.

Ice Flow: The next new one from Neil’s bag. The concept is simple - move your 3 exploreeples from start stations in Alaska to end stations in Siberia, hopping between ice floes and avoiding polar bears. The novelty here is the ice floe pieces with jagged edges. These have meaning in the game (you need to consume rope to cross them), but I was taken with the production quality of these pieces, the tiny cracks in particular..!
20 mins rules & setup; 66 mins game time.
Results: Jeff wins, over Paul and Alex.

Space Alert (again): So apparently there is a growing buzz about this game, although until the invitation emails circulated for tonight I had never heard of it. For those not aware, this is the newest title from Czech Games Edition (CGE) designer Vlaada Chvátil, of Galaxy Trucker fame. The style and board artwork is obviously by the same artist as GT, and the game play is like a Galaxy Trucker-meets-Pandemic-meets-RoboRally. The theme and real-time aspect to play are also reminiscent of the old Star Trek TNG boardgame - the one where you play a video of Gowron the Klingon barking orders at you every few minutes. In this case it was a CD of a computer-manipulated voice that sounds like the The Beastie Boys reprising their piece Intergalactic.
The game play is co-operative (in theory), although in the sessions I played it was more chaotic with an air of order and coordination. The real time aspect adds an intense sense of desperation as players arrange their cards in the best order to defend against incoming and internal threats.
When you’re playing for fun, as we were, the mistakes and miscommunications can be hilarious. As the second game began, I volunteered to position myself to fire at an incoming alien ship on our port side. I had set up a string of firing orders which were programmed with marvelous efficiency. With the orders locked in and the events beginning to play out, someone pointed out the incoming on the port side couldn’t be hit with blasts from the front cannons. But I couldn’t read this fine print on the card from where I was sitting and no-one bothered to tell me this when it first appeared. (There were some similar mix-ups with the robots in the first game). So there I was, blasting away to no effect for half the game scenario!
Anyway, fun and funny stuff that I anticipate will get much play over the coming summer.
40 mins for rules, setup and first game; 35 mins for the second.
6 consecutive games of this tonight for Richard and Pat.
Results: We survive the first scenario, blasted on the second on turn 9.

Ice Flow (again):
Neil F. beats Paula and Brian.
Brian: Do you need a holiday? Bored with Nome? Need some healthy outdoor activities where you aren’t subject to an oppressive, creationist, gun-totin’ regime? Then come across the Bering Straights and visit Russia.
You may need to avoid a few CIA agents in white fur bear costumes (all the real polar bears were shot by Gov. Palin), but these can be easily dealt with by throwing them a spare fish, and they will quite happily go off and bother one of your fellow travelers.
Global warming has provided us with numerous hexagonal icebergs, some curiously pre-supplied with fish and rope (frozen solid into a stick), and the odd CIA agent.
Grab a rope or two along the way to do some fishin’, or climb some jagged ice using a rope. Eat some omega-3 enhanced fish, with added undetectable steroids courtesy of the Australian Sports Institute, and swim to the next iceberg. (Sadly, this reporter ate 2 fish, swimming across 2 currents to reach the glorious land of Russia, which is of course against the rules, and had to remain, waiting in utter shame, for the rest of the contest in a Murmansk sushi restaurant.)
Just make sure you start up that 4WD occasionally to generate a few more useful icebergs, otherwise you might end up on the iceberg to nowhere, with no food or ropes.

Volle Wolle (again):
Results: Brian: 59. Paula: 53. Neil F: 39.
Brian: What Die Macher is to the German Parliament, Volle Wolle is to the Australian Wool Board. Not. Make a bid at the exchange, using the world’s smallest clothes pegs, and roll odd sized dice to fill your order. If you are lucky, you might even get your dog(s) a bone, but try not to get those black sheep.

Stop Go (Brian): This is a sophisticated game colourfully themed on the politics of sharing toys in the playground. There is no sharing of toys. Getting the good toys depends on guessing when others are looking the other way, or are focusing on other toys. You can only try to snatch one toy at a time. The greedy with good timing win. Light and quick.

Nobody but Us Chickens: This game is a bit like playing ‘chicken’! Something silly to end the night with.
3 mins rules refresher; 14 mins game time for 4 hands.
Results: Pat: 37. Alex: 33. Jeff: 20. Paul: 15.