THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Fortunately, the week has been, uneventful.  Just plugging away, doing what I need to do.  Working on storyboard revisions and then working on the scenes I just finished storyboarding. Not the worst thing that could happen.  The show is fun and it’s slowly getting done.  Hope the jobs stays uneventful. It’s a pain when it gets crazy.

FAMILY

Juan and Deborah had a baby shower last weekend.  It was probably the nicest, fanciest, baby shower ever.  In any case, the whole family went and we all had fun.  I think everyone enjoyed the opening of the presents best, mostly because my brother did most of the opening and then he would announce what he thought the present was for, even though he had no idea. The results where quite silly:

BOARD GAMES

(All pictures below I got at Board Game Geek.)

Okay, so in my last three posts I’ve only written about 2 player games (although both Magic: The Gathering and Dreamblade have multiplayer variant rules). At least two of which, are a little complicated (but not that much. Once you learn them, they’re just really fun.) Also, those last three games can be considered direct confrontation games. Direct confrontation games, are games where you directly attack or intrude upon the opposing player(s) in order to gain an advantage.  So I thought I’d write about one that is simple to learn, can be played by 2-5 people, is fun to play with the whole family, and is also an indirect confrontation game. By which I mean, a game where it’s possible to indirectly set back your opponent(s) by making a move in the game even though that is not the purpose of your move.

This week, I’ll be writing about Ticket to Ride: Europe.

2-5 players

Takes 45 minutes or so to play.

What is Ticket to Ride: Europe?

Ticket to Ride: Europe is the second of the Ticket to Ride series of games.  Like all the Ticket to Ride games, Ticket to Ride: Europe is about putting cards down in order to connect train routes from one city to another. By doing so, not only do you get points, but you hope to fulfill the secret Destination Cards you have in your hand. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins.

The other Ticket to Ride games are:  Ticket to Ride, Ticket to Ride: USA 1910, Ticket to Ride: Märklin Edition, Ticket to Ride: Switzerland, Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, Ticket to Ride: The Dice Expansion

How does it play?

It’s really very simple. On the table, there is a board with a map of Europe with a bunch of train routes all over it and a victory point track around the edge.

At the beginning of the game everyone takes the plastic trains of the color they wish to play and place a victory point marker on the zero space (or in this case, one hundred space) of the victory point track.

Then everyone is given five secret destination cards. If  you manage to complete them, you will get the points on the bottom of the card at the end of the game. The tougher the destination, the more points it’s worth.

The players can choose to keep as many Destination Cards as they think  they can complete, but they must at least keep one card.  If they don’t manage to complete one or more of the secret destinations in their hand by the end of the game, they lose the amount of points on the card or cards the destination is worth.

Everyone is then given a hand of five “Ticket cards”. These cards have pictures of train cars and they are different colors.  There are also Locomotive cards that are “wild” and can count as any color.

Five ticket cards are put on the table face up and the rest are put beside the face up cards as the draw deck.

The turn sequence is very simple. You can do one and only one of three things on your turn:

1. Put down plastic trains to complete a route.
2. Take two Ticket Cards.
3. Take a new destination card.

Putting down trains to complete a route – The board of Europe on the table has little colored rectangles the length of the plastic trains everyone has.  These rectangles connect two cities together.  The number of rectangles connecting the cities together vary. In order to complete a route (a connection from one city to another).  You must pay (discard) the same number of matching color Ticket Cards the route shows, from your hand.  So for example, if there are two black rectangles between Venice and Rome, you must discard two black colored Ticket Cards from your hand.  Once you do, you can take your little trains and put them on top of those two rectangles, there by, claiming that route.

There are also grey colored rectangles  on the board.  These routes can be claimed by paying the number of cards of any one color Ticket card you have. Once you put down trains, you score points depending on the length of the route you claimed.  You do this by moving you victory point marker the amount of spaces the route was worth around the victory point track.

Taking two Ticket Cards – The way you get the right amount of Ticket Cards in your hand to make a route is by taking Ticket Cards on one of your turns.  Remember, you can only do ONE action during your turn, so this means, if you decide to take Tickets and have enough to set down a route, you’ll have to wait till your next turn to put the route down.

If you decide to take Ticket Cards, you have two options, you can either:

1. Take two Ticket Cards from the five face up cards or
2. You can take two Ticket Cards from the face down draw deck

If you decide to take Ticket Cards from the five face up cards, you replace the cards you took by taking two new cards from the draw deck and putting them face up on the table.

Taking new Destination cards – If you have managed to complete all your secret Destinations (or even if you haven’t) you may choose not to put a route or take any Ticket Cards.  Instead, you can decide to pick up three destination cards and you may keep as many of them as you like.

The game ends when one player has two plastic trains or less in their hand. Everyone then adds their Destination Ticket scores to their victory points. If they failed to complete a Destination, the score on that card is subtracted from their victory points.  Everyone then counts to see which person has the longest continuous connection of trains.  The person who has, gets the Longest Route Card and gets an extra ten points.  The winner is the person with the most points.

So that’s it. That’s the game in a nutshell.  There are some minor rules I left out for the sake of brevity.  I just wanted to show the main flow of play.  Yes, even with the minor rules I left out, the game is really that simple.

Why I like it.

Well, there is actually a few reasons.

1. It’s simple, which means, it can be played by just about anyone.
2. It’s easy to teach.
3. It’s tense.
4. It can be very deep.
5. It has indirect confrontation (sort of).

I try to get people to play games with me all the time.  One of the things I’ve discovered is that not everyone has a head for games that require too much thought.  Many of the games I like, some people find complicated.  I don’t understand this since I find ALL games pretty complicated when you sit down with it for the first time.  You just have to be patient and let the game play out once before it starts to click.  Still, not everyone has the patience or the capacity to keep track of too many rules.  I’ve found that Ticket to Ride: Europe is sooo simple that even the people who have problems with most games, don’t have problems with this one. Grandma, Grandpa, six year olds…you name them, they can play it.

Because of this, the game is really easy to teach.  Everything is laid out on the table and the rules explanations take about ten minutes.  Awesome. Wish all games where this simple to teach.

After playing the game quite a few times, the game begins to get more and more tense.  That’s what make the game fun.  If you play the game in a table with people who know how to play, woah, the game becomes real dramatic.  Why? because when you’re handed you Destination Cards and you have to decide which ones to keep, you have to make sure your going to be able to complete them.  It’s very possible in the game that other players may take the routes needed for you to complete your Destinations. If you choose the wrong ones, you may be out of luck. Once the game starts, it’s all about racing to put down the tracks you need to try to complete your routes. It’s odd but the game is really exciting, and all your doing is trying to put plastic trains on the table.

After playing it a while, it’s possible to start coming up with different strategies.  I’ve come up with a few that I haven’t yet tried. Mostly because I tend to play this game with people who are just learning to play.  I’m sure I’ll eventually be able to try them out at some point.

I’ve mentioned above that the game has indirect confrontation (sort of). The “sort of” part is because, when you first start learning to play the game. You will often mess up your opponent’s plans, without trying to. It will just happen because you’re trying to complete your Destinations. Your opponents will then have to try to work around whatever inconvenience you have caused them. However, as you get better at the game, you might begin to do this on purpose.  Seeing where your opponent is putting down routes and guessing where they need to put down routes next, you may put down your own trains down blocking you opponent from being able to complete destinations.  I have yet to play a game that cutthroat but I’m sure I will at some point.

The game is fun. I have yet to play it with anyone who didn’t like it.  I highly recommend it, if your looking for a game to play with the family or “non gamers”.

As I’ve written before in an earlier post, this game, and some of it’s brothers, can be played on X-box live.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Okay, so we didn’t end up working on the revisions for the Simpsons’ opening.  Apparently there were quite a few re-writes.  I kinda liked the way it was. I got a chance to see it a few days ago and saw that they’ve added a lot of new things and the opening seems longer this time.

The new opening is  going to surprise a few people.  Some people will be thrilled that the opening is new and different after 20 something years.  Other people will probably complain about it.  It’ll be fun to see peoples reactions.  I’m sure the new opening will grow on me.

In other news, we ended up working late again on Thursday and Friday because we got taken off the show we were working on and put on the DVD menu animation for the next box set.  I guess it was do right away and the stuff we had to do was really complicated.  It was very hard work.

Since I stayed late on Friday, I wasn’t able to get home to play any board games with Andy last week.

THE HORROR…the horror!

FAMILY

Eduardo (my daughter’s Godfather), celebrated his birthday this weekend.  We went over to his birthday party and had fun eating and playing games.  At night, many of us got together and played a game of Texas Hold ’em.  I played better than usual, which is to say, I won more often than I lost and didn’t lose all my chips like I usually do.  Alesha did surprisingly well as well.  She pulled off some really good plays.  It was a lot of fun.

Happy Birthday Eduardo!

BOARD GAMES

The Pictures of the game below, I got at Board Game Geek.

Okay, so last week I wrote about Dreamblade, one of my two favorite games. Today I’ll write about Chase, my other favorite game.

What’s it about?

Chase is an abstract strategy game that’s played on a hex board and it shares some similarities with Chess but uses dice as it’s game pieces.

What similarities does Chase share with Chess?

Well, like Chess, Chase is a perfect information game whose pieces move designated ways.  Many Chess strategies like “pins” and “forks” can be used in Chase.  Thinking a few moves ahead is also a must, as is having control of the center. Like Chess, Chase has no element of chance.

How is Chase different from Chess?

You can see from looking at the game that the board is a hex board and the pieces are dice.

The dice are never rolled. The pips on the faces of the dice, on each side, must add up to 25 and stay that way through out the game.  This means that when one of your piece is captured, the number of pips showing on the captured piece, must be added to die with the lowest pip that you own. The point of the game is to capture enough of your opponents pieces so that they can no longer assign pips to their dice without going over 25 pips.

The number of pips showing on the face of your die, is the “speed” or number of spaces in can move. It has to move exactly that much.  If there is a piece in the way, your opponent’s or yours, that prevents that piece from moving it’s full movement in that direction, it cannot move in that direction.  If an opponent’s piece is exactly the number of moves away as your piece can move, you may capture that piece.  If YOUR piece is exactly the number of moves away as your piece can move, then you can land on that space and “bump” your piece over to the next hex.  This can be used to capture opponent’s pieces (by bumping them into your opponent’s piece) as well as helping set up pieces that aren’t quite where you wanted them to be.

Also, when you have two of your own pieces adjacent to each other, instead of making a move, you can adjust the pips on both the adjacent pieces so they show what ever number of pips you want, as long as the sum of both pips add up to the same amount as they started with.  For example, if you started with a die showing 2 pips and another showing 4 pips, you may change the pieces to show a 1 and a 5 or a 3 and a 3 or you can even switch the numbers so the lowest now shows a 4 and the other becomes a 2.

The board is interesting as well, the left and the right side of the board, “raps around”. In other words,  if you start your movement on one side of the board  you can end it in the other side of the board. Meanwhile, on the top and bottom of board, do NOT rap around but rather, the pieces are allowed to ricochet off the walls.  This means that if your piece hits the bottom or top of the board. it continues moving in the direction of the board that would make the move into a  “V” shape (or an upside down “V” shape if you hit the top of the board).

Finally we have the Chamber.  The Chamber is a hex directly in the center of the board, which is usually darker than the others.  When a piece moves into the Chamber, it splits into two pieces, each, half the amount of the die that went in.  So if you put 4 speed piece in, it spills out the Chamber as two pieces with 2 pips showing.  A five would come out as two pieces with one showing  2 pips and the other  3 pips.

So that’s a quick overview of the game. For the full rules of the game Click Here.

Why do I like it?

First I have to say that I don’t actually own a copy of this game. I’ve only played the game online so my experience with this game is a little strange.  It’s out of print but you can easily find a copy on e-bay. I could easily make this game at home  too but I really enjoy having the time to think about my next move when I play online.

Once again, like with Dreamblade and Chess, this game has pieces with variable “powers”, which I’m a huge sucker for.  Not only that, but having the ability to change the speed (“power”) of your pieces, just makes it even cooler.

Chase is by far, one of the most creative abstract games I’ve ever played.  It’s very difficult to predict your opponents moves, only because the options are sometimes really overwhelming.  It’s not very often that you get “stuck” for a move to play.  There is always something strange or unpredictable that you can do to turn the game to your own advantage. It’s a very “open” game for your creativity.

Also, one of the things that’s amazing about playing Chase, is the way you often WANT your opponent to capture your pieces. Sometimes your opponent’s apparent strength is he’s biggest weakness.   A lot of this game is about positioning your pieces to take advantage of getting captured. It’s also about using you opponents best moves against him.  Taking his move and turning it to your advantage.

Not only that, but the Chamber plays a huge part in the game.  Being able to get you pieces back by splitting them, is a big deal. Games often turn into enormous Chamber Wars, where many pieces are set up to make Chamber moves (if you make the right moves) while others are ready to nullify the moves as soon as they happen.

Chase really sticks with me when I play it.  I often find myself spending hours thinking about my best move and my opponents best counter move so I can then make the best next move.  Often getting stuck because there are waaaay too many good moves to make, making it difficult to predict which one your opponent will choose. I often find myself completely surprised after seeing the move my opponent made, only because it never occurred to me that they could do it. Just when you think your winning, POW! “Holy cow! Where did that come from?!” Then you start desperately studying the board in order to come up with something equally as crazy.  It’s sooo fun.

After playing this game, I’ve found Chess very restrictive.  Last time I played Chess, I found myself wishing I could bump a piece with another or exchange the movement of two adjacent pieces.  I was wishing I could turn the game in my favor by sacrificing a piece to buff up another.  I was even wondering if I could stick a Chamber somewhere so I can get my pieces back.  Chase really spoiled me.

I love this game, I highly recommend it.

If you want to lose a game to me play a game against me, you can join the Super Duper Games site and challenge me to a game.  It’s free and easy to sign up. It’s turn based, which means,  you get an e-mail letting you know when it’s your turn. My site name is “Daarck”.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Been working hard on the new opening these last couple of weeks. Came into work last Friday and Saturday for a few hours.  Stayed late every day this week and I’m planning to work this Friday and Saturday as well.

It’s really stressful and kinda fun at the same time.  Working on and revising the original scenes.  So far I’ve worked on the shots of Maggie “driving” these last couple of days. The first two scenes were fairly easy scenes in general but the last scene I got was really big and a lot of work.  It’s the scene where Maggie and Marge honk the horn at the same time. All I had to do was Maggie because someone else drew Marge but it is still a lot of work.  As of the time of this writing, I’m still working on it.

Sooo tired right now….

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

FAMILY

We had a very active Christmas.  I can’t say I had much fun.  It was very busy. I think the best part was seeing Munchkin and Dante open up and play with their presents.

We usually celebrate the 24th.  It’s a tradition my native country tends to do.  We stay up and countdown to midnight as if it’s new years and then we hug and cheer.  This year, I worked on the 24th, drove two hours home in heavy traffic, got ready and drove an hour back in the direction I’d come from to go to the Christmas eve party.  It wasn’t pleasant.  Very few people showed up to the party, and most of the people I was hanging out with (my brother Juan and his wife Deborah) were just as tired as I was.  Munchkin seemed to have the best time of all.  We had a white Elephant and she liked picking the present and then opening it.  Later, my brother, Deborah, Alesha and I sat on the couch fighting off sleep, waiting till midnight.  We didn’t have much energy to do much.  Munchkin had fallen asleep on me at that point. We left soon after midnight.

The 25th was a little better. The kids woke up early and we gave them their presents. Then we all got ready and went to a Spanish Mass in the morning.  We got there three minutes late and thought we wouldn’t get a seat, since Christmas Masses are notorious for being crowded.  We were surprised to find the Mass had very few people in it.  After Mass we went to my in-laws and hung out there for a while.  I was tired and fell asleep on their couch for about fifteen minutes or so.  Munchkin and Dante opened up presents and played with them.  When Dante began to get fussy and sleepy, we left (he doesn’t seem to like going to sleep in their house for some reason).   We then drove to my parent’s house and spent the rest of the night there.  My cousin Carolina and her family showed up, as well as my brother and Deborah.  I brought my Playstation 2 this time, so that my cousins daughters had something fun to do.  They probably had the most fun of all.  Everyone else seemed to be just as tired as they were the night before.  We ate, opened presents, and talked.  Besides the girls playing video games, no other games were played that night.  I got some cool Legos though.

Best part of the Holidays was seeing the kids have fun with their new stuff.  Otherwise it was just a lot a work.  Personally, for me, the best day last week was Friday night.  Why?  Read on…

BOARD GAMES

Andy came over to play games Friday.  I had been so desperate to play games the whole week that when he came over, I just decided I was going to go on a “board game binge” and get “drunk on games”. It was  3:00 am by the time we stopped playing that night.  We played seven games, not all the same board game.  Three were Dreamblade games, one was a game of HeroScape, two were game of Magic: The Gathering CCG (which Alesha joined us for) and one was a game of World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. I managed to lose every single game.

PODCASTS

Father Roderick (of the Daily Breakfast and other SQPN shows) surprised me last week when he mentioned me on his Christmas show.  He also mention my obsession with board games (although he was very kind about it and said it was my “passion” for board games).

In any case, it gave me the idea that maybe I should blog about my top ten board games, why they differ from most of the mass market games (since most of the ones I like are not mass market), and why I personally find them to be so much fun.  After that, maybe I’ll write about other games I own (and even the ones I don’t) and write about why they are interesting. As soon as I get some time, I’ll begin doing that.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS
I’ve had a very stressful couple of days at work.  Mostly because I’ve had to make sure to get my work done on time.  We have less time to finish what we have because of the Thanksgiving holiday.  I was really cranking out the work as fast as I could.  I even worked through lunch on Tuesday because I was given an unexpected last minute scene that morning and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it in time.  The scene I was already working on was very complicated.  I finished though.  I made the mistake of carpooling to work with my wife that day.  If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have had to worry so much.  Carpooling doesn’t allow me to stay late so since that wasn’t an option, I had to get my scenes done before my wife came by to pick me up.  It was a pain.  Of course, I didn’t know I was going to be given a last minute scene.  If I hadn’t finished, I would have had to come in and work during the holiday.

Now that I’m done with work and I’m off for the next couple of days, I have to worry about whether I’ll have a job after I come back.  It’s not going to be a very restful holiday.

FAMILY
The kids are sick.  They have a cold and they cough and sneeze and are generally irritated a lot by it.   I’m not sure if that is why Dante decided to wake up at 5:00 A.M. Sunday.  It was awful for me to wake up early, mostly because I’d gone to bed a 3:00 A.M. that morning (more about that in the BOARD GAMES section). Alesha took care of him for a while and let me sleep a bit but in the end, I was forced to get up having had only four hours of sleep. In order to not get mad at Dante for keeping me up, I decided to take him to Mass with me at 7:00 A.M. That way I could at least have something to do while I waited for him to get tired and go back to sleep.  Not only did it energize me, but by the time Mass was over, Dante was ready for a nap.  Of course, by that point Munchkin was awake, so I didn’t get to take one myself.

Later that day, I took Munchkin out to ride her Hummer again (see last post).  She drove over to the playground where she stopped and played with the car radio.  I rode my skateboard around the playground, just for fun.  Almost fell once or twice.  Munchkin saw a cat out by the playground and we went over to pet it a bit. She also tried riding my skateboard but couldn’t really manage it.  In the end, she just sat on it and pushed herself around.  When she got tired of the playground, she drove around the housing community and then we went home.

Alesha was at home on a Sunday for once but she wasn’t able to help out with the kids because she had work to do.  I was really tired from my lack of sleep so, playing with the kids was really difficult.  My body was just shutting down on me.

My brother Juan and his wife Deborah, had called me the day before to see if they could come over and visit.  Since I hadn’t seen them in months I told them they could.  It was good to see them again after such a long time.  I found it interesting that my sister-in-law is about six or seven months pregnant but doesn’t look it.

Well, while they were over, Munchkin had been given some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat.  She’d pretty much abandoned them half eaten on her little kids table.  Dante, of course, kept prowling around the little table like a hungry puppy.  Even though, he’d been given two jars of gerber and some treats only fifteen minutes before.  I had shooed Dante away from the little table more than once and he looked like he was going to behave.  I had gotten into a conversation with my brother and when I decided to turn around and check up on the kids I saw this:

I ran over there to take away the sandwiches and Dante began crawling away from me as fast as he could.  He knew he was in trouble.  Problem was he didn’t let go of the sandwich slices which he smashed into the carpet as he “ran”, leaving jelly and peanut butter behind.  When I finally caught him, he refused to let go of the sandwiches and smashed them in his little hands.  After cleaning up the mess and getting Dante clean, my brother noted that Dante seemed to have a very self satisfied expression on his face. What am going to do with this kid?  It was funny though.

BOARD GAMES

(All pictures below, I got from Board Game Geek)

Andy came over twice this weekend to play games; once on Friday night and once on Saturday night.  On Friday we played a game ofDreamblade (which I won), and then we played two games of Battlelore (which I lost).  It was the first time Andy had played Battlelore and he really enjoyed it.   It was great.  I’m glad because that’s one of the games I own that I like to play the most. The second game we had played of it that night, was really close. It was decided by one die roll.  It could have been anyone’s game.

At the end of the night, he had so much fun that he asked to come over the next night.  I said, “of course!” and so the next night he came over to play some more.

On Friday, Alesha had shown some interest in playing a game, but she was too tired to play, so she went to bed.  On Saturday she had enough energy, so when Andy came over, we played a game of Agricola (a game about farming).  It was the first time that I had played it with people (I had played the solitaire version of it before) and it was the first time Andy and Alesha had played it. We had a great time playing it. Lots of banter going on around the table and lots of laughter.  The game lasted about two hours.

Andy came in first, I came in second, and Alesha came in third.  Alesha had not realized she needed to have as balanced a farm as possible in order to score well.  She said she had a great time even though she came in last.  Andy had gotten a crazy amount of good cards that really helped him out and that he really used well.

Alesha went to bed after the game but Andy and I stayed up and played two games of Dreamblade.  I lost the first game pretty badly and barely squeaked out a win, in the second game. By the time it was over, it was 3:00 Å.M. (and if you’ve read the above post, you know how that turned out).

Tuesday night, on our drive home, Alesha asked me if I wanted to play a game when we got home (as if there was a time I don’t). When we got home and after the kids went to bed, Alesha picked out The Settler of Catan Card game to play.  It’s a two player only Catan game.

On a different day, we’d tried it once but hadn’t had time to finish because we played it late at night on a week day and had to stop playing it so that we could get some sleep.  This time, we played it all the way to the end.

I’ve never seen seen Alesha have so much fun playing a game.  It was great to see her that happy.  She loved the game.  Especially because she won by really jacking me and messing up some of my cities and settlements.  The Catan Card Game is really fun but I was very surprised at how mean some of the cards are.  You can really jack your opponent pretty badly in the game and Alesha played a very aggressive game that night.  It was fun, even though I lost.

I feel liked I got a lot of gaming in these last few days,  I like it!

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