This next week I have off from school. Yay! Which means I will be taking time to clean the apartment and getting it ready for the new baby who is due November 10. Also, if you remember the situation with the new school not being ready for us to teach in, and me having to teach in the gym, well the new school is set to be finished this week. Then they will have four inspections, and the plan is to be ready to go by the Monday after the break. We'll see how that turns out. I had really high hopes, up until during an after school meeting with all the teachers when the administrators had a guy come in to encourage us that it would be done on time. After his talk I felt way less optimistic that it would be done. That's called irony: when an event occurs opposite of what you would expect. They expected it to make us more optimistic but instead it made me less optimistic. Dude, I don't know what we'll do if it's not ready by then.
Played my new game Dice Forge at clubs night a few weeks ago and with Heather twice yesterday. I won at clubs night by 5 points and Heather beat me once and I beat her once, by about 6 points and then about 20 points. It's a fun game.
Alex said he'd be interested in playing Pandemic Legacy with more of his brothers than just Eric, and I totally want to, but I have no idea when I'll be in Fallon next, much less for an extended period of time. This year was the year Heather, Henry and I would go to Fallon for Thanksgiving and Mesa for Christmas, but with the baby being born on November 10 we weren't planning on going anywhere for Thanksgiving.
The new baby is coming soon and Henry is very excited. He points at Heather's tummy and says, "Baby sister come out! Right now!" What a cute kid. He's going to be so good around her. Maybe a bit too friendly. We'll have to make sure he doesn't cuddle her too hard. Or try to feed her anything. Or anything like that.
Speaking of Henry, this last week Heather, Henry and I went to a farm place that had a corn maze and was selling pumpkins and had a whole bunch of fun stuff for families and kids. There was a little petting zoo area there that Henry loved, and we got a video. There was also this wide but short metal slide that you could go down into corn seed that Henry absolutely loved. When we got home he still had corn seed hiding in his clothes that we had to get out. I got a video of him playing with it later and singing to himself too.
So this next week I'll be cleaning up and getting the apartment ready for the baby, since I have the week off of work. My Grand Canyon University master's is going well. Hopefully my American Preparatory Academy building will be ready by next week. Speaking of my school, we're already getting ready for Winterim and we're sending in our Winterim proposals! I'm doing Game Design again obviously and I'm also going to offer the Psychology and Science one I did last year too, but now I'm calling it Psychology, Philosophy, and Science wince we talked a lot of philosophy last time, too. For a third class I was thinking about offering a Brandon Sanderson class, and we could talk about the Cosmere and create our own magic systems and the like. I might team up with another teacher who's actually good at writing to do that one though. We'll see.
I did a lot of work this past week on the art files for the Game Design class winners. Along with that, I also did some work on my Somerset game. Every Tuesday at BYU they have a Clubs night, where different clubs get together to do their thing. Two weeks ago I went to Quark, a club that in the past had played board games. I was going to see if anyone wanted to playtest Somerset. But they were only playing this Draw Something game on the internet and so we didn't. But when I was walking out I passed by the Quill and the Sword club, which is this medieval club that sword fights in the warmer months and such. They were playing cards so I figured I would try them. So last week I went over and asked if they would be interested. They were doing stuff that week but said they would be interested the following week. So this upcoming Tuesday I'm going over with Somerset to play.
Back of 16 Building cards
Back of 16 Spell cards
Fronts of Building cards
Latest page 1 of rulebook
Fitbit:
So after walking extra and getting in tons of steps all last month, coming in first out of everyone in the whole family, I have won $2! Now that I think about it, that's the hardest earned $2 I have ever gotten. At least I got some; it would have stunk to come in first and not have gotten anything.
The background behind the game People Zoo can be found here: Link! but basically I taught a class where my students made games, and the top three games would end up getting printed. People Zoo was one of those games. In People Zoo, you are an alien going back in time and kidnapping famous people from Earth's history to put in your alien zoo.
I am making the art files for all of the games this year, including this one. I thought I'd show you what they look like. The black lines surrounding the card are the cut line; the line will be removed before sending in the file, but that is about where the card will be cut out from.
The backs of the six decks: One deck per time period you can travel to.
The aliens, and the two cards where you place your
time machine to indicate which time period you are going to.
This Winterim I am teaching a Game Design. Winter is the three weeks right after Christmas break in school where the teachers get to teach fun classes of their choosing. I, of course, picked Game Design as one of my classes. So the class is learning about tabletop games, how they work, and also making a game of their own. This year the first two days of class were playing 10 games to learn about their mechanics and how they work. Since a lot of people haven't played those games before, I made some youtube videos explaining how to play. They are posted below:
I just finished up my last day of school in 2016. Not that we did a lot; we watched some educational you-tube videos. Also, all of my grades are in and locked and so I'm free and good to go. School got out a little bit earlier today. The last hour of school was the students going around to their Winterim classes for 20 minutes each. My first block is my psychology and science class, and so I got to see a few of the people who would be there. I don't have a second block (I'll have lunch duty) so I spent that time cleaning my classroom and getting everything ready.
My third block is Game Design! I had previously made up worksheets for the class members to fill out to give me an idea of how familiar they are with games. Basically it was a long list of games asking them if they've played it or at least heard of it before. Then I explained what the rough schedule would be like for the three weeks of Winterim: first week we'll be playing games to learn their mechanics, including Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Sushi Go!, Scotland Yard, Blockus, and so forth. We'd also be doing little experiments where they'd have to make their own game under certain restrictions (it has to be an abstract cooperative game, for instance). The second and third weeks would be getting into their final group and working on making an original game, and the best three games from the eight groups would get theirs printed off all professional like, from printplaygames.com.
Right now I'm on the bus home from work. Heather and I will be leaving to go to Fallon early Thursday morning! I can't wait! I actually had a dream two nights ago that I was already there, but I thought it was too good to be true so I asked Ryan if I was dreaming and he said, "Yeah, you are." Anyway, I should be grateful that I'll be able to get to Fallon so soon. One of the sisters I home teach said that her school went all the way through Thursday, so my school got out a whole two days earlier. Plus, in all reality if I had a non-teaching job there would be no such thing as Christmas break. I'd have to work those two weeks like normal, only getting Christmas and New Years off, and maybe their Eves as well. So I am very grateful that I have a job where Christmas break is built into it so that I actually can go home for a few weeks. It will end up being about a week and a half in the end.
I am going to put my board of my laptop to work and put words down on this blog for you to look at and know what is on my mind. This is what I am doing right now; I am thinking of things to say and I am typing a lot of thoughts in my mind onto my laptop. Ah, this is so hard. Okay, so I am not actually doing that; I am just trying to put out a paragraph that has no E's in it. Man, that was tough.
It's almost Christmas! To celebrate, I'll do what my mom did and post a few of my favorite Christmas songs onto my blog.
Breath of Heaven. I love this song. There are a few different covers out there, but here's one where it sounds good and the video's good.
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Love this song. Love this version.
What child is This. Should that have a question mark after it? The name of the song doesn't.
Carol of the Bells. It is by far my favorite "secular" Christmas song.
Last week on Saturday we had a ward Christmas party! There was great food and we got to talk to friends and have a wonderful time. One of the things we did was the Primary and Nursery put on a little Christmas pageant for the ward. The Nursery got to be the main actors and the Primary got to play the farm animals that were in the stable. Hannah got Henry a little cow hat and so Henry was a cow for the pageant. I videoed it, and then put it on youtube. I've included it here for your enjoyment!
Last week I posted my list of games I am planning on playing at least once during Christmas break. My mom and cousin made a few more suggestions. They are as follows.
Liebrary: A fun (and funny) game where the players are read a book title and synopsis, and then have to make up what they think the first line of the book is. Meanwhile the player that read the card writes down the real first line of the book. Answers are collected, shuffled, and then read out loud, and players guess which one is the real first title. They move forward if they guess it correctly or if anyone guesses for their line. "Is this thing on? Is this thing on?"
Wits and Wagers: A trivia party game where you don't have to know the exact answer. All the answers are numbers, and once everyone guesses a number you arrange them from smallest to largest and guess which was was the closet to the right answer without going over.
Apples to Apples pictures: I looked this up online and I think its name is technically Big Picture Apples to Apples. Apples to Apples with pictures instead of words.
Oddly Obvious: A party game where the answers are written on the card; all you have to do is shout out the correct one before anyone else. Let's hope that I'm better at Alex than this.
Specter Ops: My cousin Ben made this suggestion. This was listed as one of the Dice Tower's top ten deduction games. It was also on their list of top ten games that stress them out due to the fact that all the players but one are tracking and hunting down that one player, and so playing as that one player is super intense, so I can't wait to try.
Well, that's it for now. Those were the suggestions I got from my family. But there are a few more....
For my Game Design Winterim class this year I've been getting stuff together. The first two to three class periods this year will be introducing the students to different game mechanics they might not have heard of before. Some have only ever played Monopoly. (If you just died inside reading that, I feel ya.) The following three games are games I ordered for the class that I might also bring down to Fallon to play this Christmas if there's interest.
Shakespeare: I picked this one because it has a worker placement mechanism, some blind bidding, variable turn order, and a little bit of card drafting. And it has to do with Shakespeare, which is awesome. This game actually arrived today! In Shakespeare you have six days to practice putting on a play, hiring actors, and getting set designers and costume makers to put on the best play possible. It has a very high rating and has received positive reviews.
Sushi Go!: This game is pure card drafting. Much like 7 Wonders, which I was considering for the class, but this one is much simpler and therefore I think better. You basically pass your hand around getting a new card every turn just like 7 Wonders and trying to complete sets of sushi. This game has also received very positive reviews.
Scotland Yard: This game won the Spiel de Jahres way way way back in the day in the year 1983. This is the game Mr. Baker recommended. It's asymmetrical, which is the main reason why we're picking it. For those on the detective side it's also cooperative, which is another reason why we picked it. I've never played it before (except for once on my mission where we just had the board and pieces but no rules so we made up the rules) but it looks fun. I've never player Specter Ops before either but just based off of what I know of these two games they seem pretty similar.
Thanksgiving break is over. Well, it has been over for about a week now. But one more thing I am thankful for: driving home safely afterwards. In Mesa, we looked online and also heard that there was a severe weather warning in Utah. I remember driving to Fallon one year, I think it was for Thanksgiving, that the roads were just super terrible. I remember passing a piece of highway where three cars had skidded off onto the side of the road, and one point where there was just one lane which was slick. It was a nightmare. So learning about the severe weather literally gave me a panic attack and anxiety. We left on Sunday after sacrament. We were going to originally go straight up through the Kanab route but with the weather warning I wanted to be on interstates the entire time: none of this going on one-liner streets through the woods in the middle of nowhere at night. So we decided to take the route through Las Vegas.
We got on the road, and everything was going smoothly. There was this one point where it started pouring down rain like crazy and that was pretty frightening. Then there was this one point in the road which I missed last year: there's this turn I'm supposed to make off of the 40 to stay on the 95, and last trip I missed it and had to backtrack a bit to get back on the right trail. This time I knew that that might happen and so I was on the lookout. And I missed it again. I knew something was off when I passed the sign saying: "Welcome to California." Great. But by that time we were so far off that it was faster to just keep on that road and turn north later on. By the time we finally got to Vegas due to my mistake, it was already dark. But the Lord blessed us and we were able to be on our way. I was still anxious about the horrible snowy weather that was coming up. But in the end, the Lord blessed us yet again and the roads were nice and clear and there was inly one spot where it was really snowing, but we got through that super easily. When we reached Provo finally at around 12:30 a.m., it was softly letting down flakes of snow, but absolutely nothing like that trip to Fallon I was talking to you about. So we were definitely blessed.
Winterim
Winterim year: It looks like off the three blocks, I'll be teaching my Psychology and Science class during the first block, my Game Design class during the third block, and during the second block I'll be... doing lunch duty, I guess? There are four teachers who aren't teaching a class second block and are instead doing lunch duty. But it will a nice break.
Seafall
I've been looking up the game Seafall in preparation to play the campaign this Christmas break with Eric, Ryan, and Alex. It seems pretty interesting. I'm not sure what course to take: making exploring or plundering better, or upgrading my storage in my ship or making it sail farther. I'm leaning toward plundering and hold space right now, but I'll have to wait and find out what the rewards are for exploring, which you only access in the captain's book when you explore that region. Maybe the rewards will be super good and I'll think about needing more dice for that than for raiding, who knows?
However, and I must mention this, the reviews for Seafall are mixed at best. One of the problems, as pointed out by the Dice Tower here, is that the game had so much hype to it. Your expectations are shot so high by anticipation that when it finally comes around to play it, you might be disappointed. Also, as pointed out in this review here, while Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy had legacy elements put onto an already fun well established game, Seafall did not. So while the legacy aspects might seem exciting, the game itself by its own might not stand the test of time. I'm still excited and want to play, but I'm not sure how smart it would be to spread out all the games over the entire Winter break like we were planning on. Maybe playing 2 or even 3 games in one day might be better? Who knows. We'll find out during Christmas break. Which I'm totally excited for.
Bushes of Love
The other day I walked some students down to their classroom during lunch because they were just standing around the hallway. When I got them back to their class which was having lunch in there, they were watching one of the wriest you tube videos I've ever seen. And the thing is, I swear I've seen it before. If I were to guess I'd say that it was Danny that showed me way back in the day when they lived in the Stoehr's first house (as opposed to their second house where Heather had Thanksgiving with us a few years ago, and their third house which they have now), but that can't be right because the video's only 11 months old. I swear I remember being scared that a chicken-duck-woman-thing would attack me from the bushes though when I was younger... oh well. Here's the video:
Somerset
Without photoshop on my computer, it's hard to work on files for the rules for Somerset, but here's the cover page and the first page at least:
This weekend my brothers Eric and Ryan came to visit my family here in Provo! And what else would we do except play games of course! The plan was for them to arrive Friday afternoon, but that ride never got back to them, so they were stuck with a ride that came in on Saturday instead: at 2:30 in the afternoon. In Draper. Heather and I went to pick them up from the Loveland Aquarium, and went back to our place.
The first game we played was Interstellar Pig, which I neglected to get pictures of. Heather almost won, she had the Piggy until one of the last turns of the game, and then Eric stole it from her and ran away from everyone until time ran out. Ryan, meanwhile, died on Earth. Sad day.
We played a game of Elysium next. We started with just the beginner's suggested set: Zeus, Poseidon, Hephaestus, Hades, and Athena. I ended up winning.
Saturday night playing Elysium. Eric is reading White Sand between turns.
After that, we played a game of Istanbul, and then another game of Elysium, with different god cards. Heather won both. That last game ended up taking us way past midnight, but everyone had a good time. Too bad we had 8 am church.
The next day after church we played a quick game of Temple Escape. This is one of the games that my Game Design class did last Winterim, which ended up being one of the three best, so we sent in the files to a print and play website to get the pieces professionally made. Check them out at printplaygames.com. The tiles and pieces are totally legit.
Not sure what Ryan is doing with his face.
The whole crew!
After playing Temple Escape, which Ryan won, we played another game of Istanbul with a different board layout.
Notice how the game is on the other side of the table from Henry?
Ryan's face is like: Whhaaa--!?
Then there was only a half hour before my brothers had to go, so we played a quick game of Blokus. When Eric and Ryan took off, I gave them Elysium and Istanbul to borrow, so that they could take them down to Fallon so that they could play at Thanksgiving. So if you're in Fallon for Thanksgiving, be sure to give them both a try; they're both super awesome games. Istanbul won the German Game of the Year award, and Elysium was nominated but didn't quite win.
I totally won this game, fyi.
It's too bad their visit was so short, but we had a blast.
P.S. We also discussed how to play Seafall without bingeing it, and we decided that we should play over Christmas break, one game a day. I wasn't sure if one game a day was bingeing it too much, but Eric said that the number of other games we would be playing would dilute it, so that that was fine. We might have to play two games a day for a couple of days just to be sure that we finish it during the vacation. I also hope to play Elysium, Istanbul, Castles of Burgundy, Five Tribes with expansion, Ashes, 7 Wonders: Duel, Terra Mystica, and a ton of other games as well.
My wife is so great.She and I were looking at Master’s programs that I can take to get my
Master’s degree, and we were looking at an online program for Southern New
Hampshire University.Along with the
normal Master’s programs such as Math and science and English was one my wife
found: A Master’s in Game Design.
At first, of course, I was really excited, because number
one I love Game Design and designing games and playing them, and number two I have
always wanted to take some sort of class on that because it would offer me
great insights as to how to do it better.The closest thing I’ve found to a class on tabletop game design is this
guy right here:Classes on Game DesignThat, of course, and my own Game Design class
I teach at my school during three weeks in January.
So this idea of a Game Desing Master’s sounded really great
to me, although I had my fears.My fear
was this: nearly every time (I say nearly because once it hasn’t been: Classes on Game Design),
nearly every time there has been classes or educational programs or Master's degrees on Game Design, they have been about Video Games, not tabletop games. As so it was with this. The classes all turned out to be computing and programing classes, not classes about tabletop mechanics.
So I decided on an MA in English and Creative Writing Master's instead. It's too bad that the Game Design class wasn't what I had hoped it would be. There are still a lot of other resources out there (on the internet) that I can look at to teach me more about game design. Links: Game Design Channel, Games Precipice, and Game Development.
The structure of my game design class is going to be a little bit different this year. After teaching it for a year, I know what works, what doesn't, and what adjustments I need to make in it to have it be a better experience. More on that topic in a later post.
