ELOPDGPWOG

[jack]

Then I played quorridor with fanf, sonic and mobbsy. I hadn't realised that several of the beautiful fun games come from the same company. Gigamic seem to produce several lovely games, I think their website introduction says it fairly well, games: "both useful and ornamental, simple to learn and quick to play,a pleasure for all ages, highly creative with a new concept, challenging, of high quality and attractively presented, Gigamic has invented a bestseller - the ornamental game."

Though if you had to summarise you could say "wood" and "emergent behaviour" :)

Quorridor with four players is very cutthroat, and was fun, though I got misled halfway and ended up behind until we ended up in a fourway standoff position with tony coming out ahead in the end.

And fanf showed me Gobblets. This is very cute: a 4x4 board, and carved wooden cylinders open at the bottom of four sizes so you can play a bigger peice completely covering a smaller one. The manual shows little excited or worried faces on the peices in their how moves work diagrams which is cute beyond words.

I'm getting much better at explaining quorridor rules briefly. Four basics and one more:

(1) Start at the centre of your side of the board.
(2) Moves are one square orthogonally.
(3) Win is reaching the opposite side of the board.
(4) On your turn you can move or place a wall from your supply[1].
(A1) You may not place a wall leaving your opponent with *no* path to the end of the board[2]
(A2) If you are adjacent to another peice you may jump over it. If the jump is blocked you may jump 1 forward and 1 sideways to an empty square)

[1] Walls are two squares long and slot into grooves between squares. You start with floor(20/num(players)).
[2] Rules like this are often fun. Without it the game would be stall every time it happened, but forbidding it adds lots and lots of strategy working out what exactly could be forbidden.

But Gobblets was even simpler to learn, and much more complex to play. I ended up beating tony 3.5 to 0 which amazed me -- I'm normally not good at strategy games with much planning or remembering, and I think he normally is. But I often have a lot of beginners luck at this sort of emergent game-- I've wiped the floor at games evening at blockus for instance, coming from behind. Maybe my intuition is good but I need to practice more.

The first couple of games ended quickly but the last lasted for ages, getting tense as I backed him into a corner where every move left more and more potential lines for me, and less and less he could do, but with one move that could prolong things, and always the chance he'd form a pair of lines I couldn't block without disrupting my layout and reversing things entirely -- initiative as in chess seems important.

At the end the board was almost entirely full, and moving almost any piece would reveal a smaller one underneath that might form an opponent's line.

And we were still thinking of new strategies at the end. Though the depth of the last game stretched me to my limit; many more and I think anyone who's good at looking two moves ahead would overtake me in skill.

All in all a fun evening and fun games.