Silly Customers

Over the past week, we've had several customers in the store looking
for games to play with their children. They might come in asking for
Risk or Battleship, but they want something to play.

Inevitably they ask, "What else would you recommend?" I try to stay
away from anything too exotic like Puerto Rico, Power Grid, or even
Settlers. I try to recommend for that seven to ten year old age
things like Blokus, Quarto, maybe Carcassonne, or Ticket to Ride. The
answer I get is always the same:

"I want something I played as a child. It's fun to remember."

Nostalgia is fine and all, but somehow I wonder how much we miss out
by getting to a point in our lives where we say, "No thanks, I'm tired
of learning something new, I just want the old stuff." Life is meant
to be lived. We can't always look to the past and wish for days gone
by.

The funny thing is that Julie and I were talking the other day and she
mentioned that my gaming buddies and I tend to be just the opposite.
We want the new experience, we desire the new game. So much so that
Puerto Rico hasn't hit my gaming table in well over a year (that'll
have to change very soon). I suppose that a happy medium is in order.

Someday I hope not to become as much of a curmudgeon as I say I am,
but when, or if I do, feel free to slap me. Especially if I say I
don't want to try a new game!

True Story

Actual conversation at my game store yesterday...

"One of the tiles in my copy of Carcassonne has a wrong back. Will
this one which I'm giving as a gift also have that?"

"Um, it's supposed to be that way. Originally, the river EXPANSION
didn't exist. That was the original starting tile."

"Oh. I see. Well, they should fix that because the tile has the wrong back."

"No, it was different to make it easier to pull out."

"Oh, I see. Well, they really should fix that since it has the wrong back."

Sigh!

Ticket to Ride - Clarification

A year ago I had the pleasure of demonstrating product for the good guys
over at Days of Wonder at GenCon. As we rapidly approach this year's event,
they must have liked the job I did for them (or they've grown very
desperate!) and Mark Kaufmann asked me to come help out.

While I wasn't able to help them, I did point him to this blog / review
site. After he read my review of Ticket to Ride, he wanted to clarify
something:

"BTW: it was not Alan's geography that needed fixing. In the process of
setting the game at the turn of the century, we changed a couple of cities
in his original map - most obviously Duluth was a much bigger rail town than
Minneapolis/St. Paul, so we changed the name of the city. Unfortunately when
we went to adjust the map, it threw off number of sections between each city
in the design, so we had to leave the actual location where it was, rather
thanm move it closer to Lake Superior. By this time we'd already printed the
cards and couldn't change the name of the city so we were stuck with it. It
was an editorial fault, not Alan's."

There you go. I would suppose that explains the Helena / Billings issue in
Montana as well. But as I mentioned to Mark in a reply email, "If this is
the worst thing one can say about a game, then it must be a pretty good
game."

Words to live by...