Smorgasbord of games

John showed up first this past Thursday and after a quick bite of pizza we decide to sneak in a quick game of Carcassonne. We stayed fairly close through the game, but about a third of the way through John played his big meeple down for a nice bit of farming and I kept focusing on the city life. Towards the end of the game John had most of his meeples tied up and wasn't getting tiles that would allow him to score immediately. I was able to take advantage of several quick road scores and still had meeples for city placement which allowed me to pull ahead. In the end it was just enough as John's big meeple pulled in 36 points to end up 2 points behind me.

After that Chris, Jim and Colin showed up so we pulled out Through the Desert since we had never played with five people. It was a bit chaotic with nobody playing favorites as the game began Chris and Colin getting cut off from an oasis. Chris got himself a nice area blocked off on one side of the board and I got one on the other side. John did a good job getting to the oases, but failed to ensure he had the maximum number of one caravan. Thankfully I picked up that extra one, which combined with a nice blocked off area gave me the win. Scores were me 67, Jim 55, Chris 52, Colin 46 and John 40.

Chris had brought over my copy of Shadows Over Camelot which we hadn't played for a while so we set it up. We were having some poor luck with how the black cards were coming out with a number of grail cards followed by all of the Saxon cards (which hit Colin since he had gone there to fight them) interspersed with Excalibur cards. Four of us ended up at the grail quest and managed to take it out, but we lost Excalibur. Then the cards for the Lancelot quest came in quick turns and before anyone could get to it, it went down. I failed to pay attention to who the traitor might be and was beginning to think we didn't have one so when people started going for the Dragon quest and it was going to give us 7 white swords against 5 black I thought we had it. Sadly since it had been a while since we played we had all (except the traitorous John) forgotten the fact that an undiscovered traitor turns two white swords black. John ended up winning and the rest of us were miffed (especially Chris who had actually thought John was the traitor).

Then we finished with a game of Citadels. We've taken to playing to only six districts because eight seems to take too long and I've found the game stops being enjoyable at that point. Additionally, we prefer using the Emperor instead of the King and this time we also chose the Wizard instead of the Magician. The Thief and Assassin stayed hidden for several rounds during the game, but when they did appear Jim and I took the brunt (even though that was only being affected one round by each of them). Colin intimidated everyone by starting with a building that cost 6, but was worth 8 at the end. Chris was able to build three 4-point buildings in a row which gave a good foundation. I made the mistake of not taking the Emperor when I needed to leaving Chris (who was on my left) and John (who was to Chris' left) starting the round for most of the game. Which is probably why Chris won - the final scores were Chris 26, John 19, Colin 18, Jim 14 and myself 13.

Dragon Slaying

Tuesday night John and Colin joined me for some slaying of dragons when we played a couple games of Dungeoneer: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert. The first game saw John and I beating each other up with both of us more below 3 health than above. Unfortunately other than the excite in the first round of John and I repeatedly being near to dying the games came down to me getting lucky. In the first game I didn't like one of the quests I had been given, but I was able to get the destinations of the public quest and my other one near to each other. Then when the new public quest flipped up it happened to be in the same area as well and I was able to quickly finish the game.

In the second game I had two escort quests. My first quest pick up location came up quickly and Colin placed it as far away as he could, but I had a bane card that allowed me to swap a desert space with another one. So I moved it right next to the start and quickly completed it in one round. On my next turn I was able to place the remaining map cards which would allow me to complete my quests. On the next turn I completed both quests.

Being a role-player and having played many D&D sessions I love the concept of the game, but I have a feeling we're going to need to come up with some variations (which looking at the updated rules it looks like there are some worth trying) in order for this to be really enjoyable. Currently the game takes too long with too much luck in the cards drawn .

Blind Planning

So we finally pushed to try doing our development work in blocks of work that would be 6 weeks or less. We're also trying to push for the next block (yeah, I'd say iteration, but seems like a dirty word in my office place) to planned at the end of the first block. Unfortunately the project sponsors are looking for a project plan to be done and we have been unable to convince our project manager to put everything else in the next block as a place holder. This lead to our meeting this morning to attempt to plan out the remaining blocks of development. I suggested that if we were really going to do this that it might be better to actually have access to the requirement files so that we could double check details in the requirements instead of just a summary document (especially since the document we were attempting to plan from was not necessarily accurate with what it was showing since it is maintained separately). I got a flustered look and a restatement of the request.

Nice! My only hope is that the rest of the developers are also looking for coup and we just plan the next block after we get done the first one and let the project manager sort it out. Not the friendliest of approaches, but I feel unable to get our project manager to listen to any of our ideas.

Circle the game camels

This past Thursday I was joined by Jim, Colin and John and we played two games of Through the Desert followed by our constant closer, Carcassonne.

Colin hadn't played Through the Desert before and was still figuring it out. I ended up striking early and collecting a lot of high point water holes and making many oases connections. John and Jim both cordoned off a 10+ space area with one of their caravans. Fortunately I was able to get a couple small areas and longest in two of the colors and ended up with 84 points, just edging out John and Jim who tied at 81. Colin ended with 40 something.

The second game Colin had obviously learned what he had to and made a couple plays that blocked Jim and my caravans from getting to some oases. He also did a better job at ensuring he got to his own oasis and carving out a little area for himself. This time I was relying more on blocking of territory than connecting to oases. This worked well except that I realized too late that John was challenging me for the longest caravan in one of the two that I could actually do something with. When the dust settled we had each marked off a good sized area and each had at least one longest caravan. Jim got the extra one which proved the difference as he won with 82. Colin and John tied at 81 and I ended up with 79.

Carcassonne was an odd game. We generally have a much better farming area in the games we play, but because of an early profusion of roads, creation of larger cities and a mean play by Jim the meadow stayed fractured. John had started a city that I thought I'd try a quick take over of and put my large meeple (Gurn) into. John made it so he could tie a second one of his meeples in. Jim then played a tile that made it impossible for us to connect the two parts of the city and ever close them so Gurn and two of John's pieces were done for the game and we hadn't even played a third of the tiles. John and I went on a partnering frenzy after that completing a cathedral-ified city plus some other smaller ones a couple roads (including one we took over from Jim that had an inn on it). Jim was still doing well for him self throughout this. Colin unfortunately drew all but one or two of the monasteries and they came at a time when he would've preferred to try horning in on the cities being built. In the end Colin did manage to get 40 points from farming, but the rest of us had already made our points and I succeeded in edging out Jim with John just ahead of Colin.

Task Thrashing

I'm suffering from no clear direction by my project managers. I'm not sure if it is the way people have learned to do project management where I work of it is an issue with the project I'm on, but on regular basis what I'm asked for a status on changes. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with previous tasks getting done.

I suspect this has something to do with the total chaos that is the requirements and there being no real prioritizing of them. Additionally there's no clear indicator of who needs to work on each requirement. Which I presume leads to complete confusion when trying to figure out what they are expecting to be done next.

I'm not sure what would be the biggest impact to getting clarity on this, but I suspect breaking down the requirements into smaller bite-sized chunks and letting the development team figure out who should work on them and not trying to assign them at requirement creation time might help.