Keep in mind my perspective as you read this. These are not (necessarily) the best video games of each year, but rather the best *thinking games* for digital platforms. (I'll throw in my opinion about the most important / influential / best video games from time to time, but they'll be limited to honorable mentions.)

     2000 - The Sims

I'm never quite sure how to categorize The Sims. It's always labeled as a "strategy game" in video game market research reports, but it doesn't really have winners or losers. I've always counted Dungeons & Dragons as a thinking game, so I think I'm supposed to count The Sims too. Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that this was an incredibly well executed and wildly popular game.

Honorable mentions: Diablo II, Counter-Strike.

What an amazing year. Diablo II is still the best action RPG of all-time, and was my own guilty pleasure game for many years. And Counter-Strike (which is technically a user-generated mod of Half-Life) showed people how poplar an online multi-player shooter could be (a genre that still dominates the industry to this day).

     2001 - Party Poker

I could just as easily have given the nod to Poker Stars, which was a bit better polished at the time and is bigger today (plus Paradise Poker pre-dates both of them), but it was really Party Poker and it's aggressive marketing that launched the online poker boom. No one in the video game industry seems to talk much about online poker, but I'm not sure why not. They're games for digital platforms that make tons and tons of money, right? They also fundamentally changed the landscape when it comes to thinking games and thinking gamers. Suddenly it was possible to directly apply your gamer skills to making money.

The Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour was a nice dream, but the truth was that only a couple dozen guys could make enough money to live on and nobody was getting rich. Kai might have had a $100,000 year once, but the typical good years were in the $50,000 range with $20,000 very much in play. Don't get me wrong, that's a hell of a lot better than flipping burgers (even before you count the fun of traveling the world and hanging out with cool people) and it's a lot of money when you're college-aged; but it's not really a career. Most of the really great players eventually find something more lucrative to spend our time on. Meanwhile it's really tough to stay on top of the game unless you're devoting all of your time to it, so the Pro Tour winds up with a steady stream of hungry 20-somethings rising up and dominating for a couple of years before they grow up and move on.

Anyway, the poker boom provided a way to pursue the whole "gaming is way more fun than getting a real job" thing while having significantly more earning potential. The World Poker Tour launched in 2002 and things really heated up when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003. Not only did he provide an "anybody can win" story that the media adored, but he also won his entry fee in a PokerStars satellite tournament, thus attracting a lot of "dead money" to online poker as his "turned $39 into $2.5 million" story was told over and over again.

A funny thing happened to the Pro Tour with lots of its players turning to poker. Very few of them stopped playing Magic. Magic became the game that they play for fun after grinding out a living playing poker. Just because there aren't as many opportunities to win money playing Magic as there are in poker, doesn't mean it's not the more fun game. Dave Williams is probably the most visible example of this — he's been a very visible poker celebrity ever since finishing 2nd in the WSOP in 2004, but he's also continued playing Magic the whole time ranging from late-night drafts in Vegas with other Magic/poker cross-overs to a steady string of money finishes on the Pro Tour to tweeting while in Europe about the crappy WiFi that won't allow him to play Magic Online. My favorite Magic/poker cross-over story, however, is Gabriel Nassif. Nassif has managed to stay one of the best couple of players on Magic's Pro Tour for the entire decade while also making the transition from "omg this is a lot of money for a 16-year old" to "my poker ev is better, but I still love Magic."

There were some other decent thinking games in 2001 — Kohan was an intriguing take on how to do a real-time strategy game that didn't require great twitch skills, and Advance Wars really moved the tactics genre forward — but from my seat 2001 was the year that online poker changed everything.

2002 - Magic Online

Magic players used to stop playing once it became inconvenient to find opponents to play against. Around the time they graduated college, or got married, or had their first kid it became hard to make time to head down to the friendly local game store and Magic became a victim of these lifestyle changes. Ever since Magic Online came out, however, that just doesn't happen any more. Now there's always a new draft about to fire and the 10pm draft after your kid goes to sleep can be followed by the midnight "bad idea" draft. The product definitely has its flaws and it's not hard to imagine ways it could be a lot better, but if you compare life as a Magic player nowadays to life as a Magic player before 2002, things are just more awesome because Magic Online exists.

This isn't a Magic decade in review, however, so I want to talk about Magic Online in the context of other video games. I'm pretty sure it's the #2 turn-based strategy franchise of all time. Civilization has made more money, but I don't think anything else has. I'm still bound by an NDA that prevents me from discussing the details, but it's not hard to triangulate off of publicly available numbers and project a lifetime revenue above $100 million. That's not in the same league as Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, but it's still quite a respectable number, especially for a PC-only title. I wonder sometimes whether the mainstream video game world realizes how much money Magic Online has actually made.

In addition to proving that a turn-based strategy game can make real money, MTGO also proved that the digital object sales model can work. This may not sound like such a big deal nowadays with everybody's facebook wall littered with posts from social games that make their money that way, but back in 2002 it was still very much an open question. Many folks gathered at industry conferences and discussed the reasons why the so-called "Korean model" couldn't work in the States. Well it did work. Magic Online obviously had all the advantages of its relationship with Magic (built-in / captive audience, known great game-play, etc.), and it's never done a particularly good job recruiting new players into Magic (every MTGO player, to a first approximation, starts out as a paper Magic player), but within the context of Thinking Gamer awards there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone who likes strategy games will try Magic at some point and most will love it.

     2003 - Galactic Civilizations

Kind of a weak year. I almost gave the nod to Madden '04 because they re-did the engine behind their franchise mode, which is essentially a stand-alone football simulation game with a fair amount of depth and re-playability. (Madden itself is the kind of game that used to make me jealous of people with high dexterity scores, but as I've grown to embrace who I am as a gamer I go straight to the franchise mode, sim all the games, and play what amounts to a gigantic, well-flavored spreadsheet game.) Meanwhile, the most innovative game released in 2003 was almost certainly Defense of the Ancients (DotA) - the mod of Warcraft III that has become so wildly popular that multiple AAA-sized projects are now coming out which attempt to recapture that gameplay within a "real" game. DotA is too much of a dexterity game to get the nod from me, though, so I'm calling out a solid new franchise developed by Stardock. Stardock has also turned into a nice home for various strategy games and genres that the big publishers don't seem to care about and their Impulse digital distribution system has much of the same functionality as Valve's much more heralded Steam.

     2004 - Oasis

Like some of my board game choices, this one may be biased by the fact that I currently work for Mind Control Software. That said, I was not around when they developed this game and it did win several indie game of the year type awards. It's essentially a civilization-style experience boiled down into about 5-10 minutes of turn-based strategy goodness.

Honorable mention: Others seem to like the Total War series more than me, but from what I can tell 2004's Rome: Total War was the best of the series. Oh by the way, this was also the year Blizzard unleashed World of Warcraft on an unsuspecting world.

     2005 - Civilization IV

A really nice step forward for this venerable franchise. Civ III (which came out in 2001) was quite bloated, with an accumulation of new mechanics and new ideas really weighing down the game. With Civ IV they finally started cutting stuff away, eliminating the extraneous baggage so that the underlying awesome gameplay could shine through. I had thought that Civ II (which I spent many an all-nighter playing while in college in the early 90's) might have been the peak, but Civ IV was genuinely better. I also enjoyed Civ IV: Colonization, which uses the Civ IV engine to play out a New World scenario where you work for one of the European powers as they seek to colonize America and you win by seceding and then winning the revolutionary war. It's less open-ended, but the base game can sometimes take 10-20 hours to play so it's nice to have a more compact experience.

Honorable mention: Guitar Hero launched rhythm games as a mainstream phenomena and the first truly new genre added to the video game landscape in about a decade.

     2006 - Galactic Civilizations II, I guess

Hopefully somebody will post a comment with a better suggestion as I don't think Gal Civ is worthy of winning two different years, but turn-based strategy remains a niche in the video game world and there have been some dry years ...

Honorable mention: Wii Sports. The innovations continue over on the more mainstream side of the industry with the launch of the Wii and the introduction of motion controls to console gaming.

     2007 - Desktop Tower Defense

I know this wasn't the first tower defense game, but it was the first one that hooked me. It also gets credit from me for bringing Kongregate to my attention as a website full of free games worthy of checking out semi-regularly. I will always remember the first time I played it when I had the flash of insight "OH! I build a MAZE!" and to this day I don't particularly care for the fixed-path tower defense games. The challenge of figuring out how to build the maze is the best part of the genre, in my opinion, and DTD is well balanced, well executed, and damn close to the platonic ideal of this genre.

Honorable mention: Speaking of new platforms that make significant amounts of new content available, Xbox Live Arcade started coming into its own in 2007, with digital versions of a couple of tabletop classics (Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne) among the highlights.

     2008 - Braid

Playing Braid remains one of the most jaw-droppingly, mind-blowingly awesome experiences I have ever had with a video game. The time-manipulation mechanics are brilliant and the level-design is incredibly clever. Multiple times I would find myself just staring at the screen thinking, shaking my head in amazement, and knowing that the answer was there if only I was smart enough to find it. It is crystal clear to me that this was a labor of love for Jonathan Blow and the extra years he spent tightening and polishing it really show.

2nd place: Civilization Revolution. Civ Rev is by far the best game in the almost 20-year history of this franchise and it would have won most of the years in this decade. It's essentially a slimmed down version of Civ IV designed specifically for console and handheld gaming, but that's "slimmed down" in the sense of "I am so much healthier now that I've lost 100 pounds." The challenge of porting the core experience onto devices that don't have mouse/keyboard really inspired the designers and developers to ask themselves what actually mattered and the resulting game has all the strategic depth and strategic fun of a 20-hour long Civilization session boiled down into a game that can be finished in just 2-4 hours. It's the only game on Xbox where I have fully 1000 gamerscore.

Honorable mention: If you play (tabletop) Dunegons & Dragons, you really should check out D&D Insider. The Character Builder is exactly the tool you've always been hoping for (with every rule from every book and every issue of Dungeon and Dragon magazine coded into it) and that plus the Compendium make prep time a pleasure instead of a chore. I can no longer imagine building a character any other way.

     2009 - Drop7

If you're a thinking gamer and you have an iPhone then one of two things is happening right now. Either you're smiling and nodding knowingly or you're going to trust me and go straight to the app store and buy this game. It's a fairly simple game ("Tetris meets Sudoku" is the best description of it that I've heard), and the presentation is pretty sparse, but the strategy involved is remarkably deep. Hardcore mode is the best way to play as things get interesting right away and there's just the right amount of randomness so that it's replayable, and you can catch a lucky break, but you are also convinced that skillful play is what really matters. My only tiny complaint is that I really wish they would track a running average of your last 20 games. It tracks high scores and average score (and if you put in your facebook info then it will let you compare high scores with friends), but with 500+ games under my belt it's hard to move either of those numbers now.

Other 2009 finalists: Fieldrunners is a nice "build your own maze" tower defense game for iPhone. Duels of the Planeswalkers is a really nice way to play Magic against an AI, especially if you're still learning (or re-learning) the game. (It's currently only on Xbox Live Arcade, but is supposed to come out for PC and PSN in 2010). Plants versus Zombies is a bit too easy for my tastes, but it's turn-based strategy done with all the quality and polish that you can count on from PopCap.

Honorable mention: I also quite enjoyed Dragon Age, and definitely recommend it if you're looking for a single-player RPG experience.

     Decade in summary

My top 5 are Magic Online, PokerStars, Braid, Drop7, and Civilization Revolution. They're so diverse that I'm not sure I know how to rank them relative to one another. Online poker has had by far the most financial success of these five, and has changed the lives of many thinking gamers by providing them with a source of income. However, at the end of the day poker isn't as much fun as the other games on this list so it can't win. Braid is probably too small to be game of the decade. It's an awesome experience, but once you've solved it, you've solved it and you probably aren't going back to re-play it. Drop7 seems like it might be a bit too small (and a bit too unpolished) to win as well. Civ Rev didn't win it's year, but I do find it interesting that I'm still playing Civ Rev a year later whereas I'm not playing Braid any more — it does have the virtue of being quite re-playable. I even downloaded Civ Rev for my iPhone so I could work my way through some of the scenarios that I hadn't gotten to (something I don't recommend unless you already know how to play Civ because the interface is about two notches worse on an iPhone).

All of which leaves me with Magic Online. I'd feel better if it was a better polished product, or a product that I could recommend with a clean conscience to folks that don't already know how to play Magic, but even with those flaws it's still an awesome addition to the life of any Magic player. And Magic is the best thinking game of all time.

     Looking forward

Well that's my take on the decade in video games. Things were a little dry for us thinking gamers in the middle of the last decade (and the early years were saved only by MTGO and poker), but now there are a bunch of new digital distribution platforms available where publishers and/or game designers can profitably target a niche audience like us. Of the 10 games I called out from 2007 - 2009, only one of them (Civ Rev) can be purchased at a brick and mortar store. Things are looking up and I'm excited to see what the 20-10's have to bring!

Here's my take on the best board games of the last decade, broken down year by year:

     2000 - Carcasonne
A really good game, and a truly innovative design space to explore as well. It's no longer in regular rotation for me, but Santa brought "The Kids of Carcasonne" for Kira this year and I highly recommend that variant for anyone with a budding gamer who's 4-7 years old. It's easy to learn and no reading is required, but it's got a surprising amount of depth of strategy — enough to keep things interesting for parents too.

     2001 -  Transamerica over Risk 2210, I guess
Nothing I saw when searching through Board Game Geek by publishing year really seems to have stood the test of time. I've heard that Risk 2210 is quite a good variant, but I've never actually played it myself and it's a Wizards of the Coast design so my info could easily be biased. Meanwhile, Transamerica is fun enough that we still bust it out every once in a while at the ongoing WotC R&D board game night.

     2002 - Puerto Rico
This was ranked #1 for many years on Board Game Geek and with good reason. The action-drafting mechanic is really clever and the strategies in the game are quite deep. It's been recently edged on Board Game Geek by a game that does the action drafting mechanic a bit better in my opinion (Agricola) but you've got to give Puerto Rico credit not only for being the best board game of 2002, but also blazing a trail for future game designers to follow.

     2003 - Amun Re
A bit less heralded than many of the others on this list (it's only #57 on the 'Geek), but I for one really enjoy this game and our circle of gamers considers it the go-to game when we have 5 people who want to play. I think it only truly shines with 5 players, but if you've got 5 then it might just be the best game of the decade.

     2004 -  St. Petersburg (over Ticket to Ride)
I have played a ton of Ticket to Ride (esp in various digital incarnations), and it was a fine choice for Spiel des Jahres in 2004, but when given the choice I choose to play St. Petersburg just about every time. A few of the cards from the original game were overpowered or underpowered and so we now use the versions of the Mistress, Observatory, and Academy that came with the 2008 expansion; but we don't use any of the other stuff from the expansion. With those few "development" tweaks the base game remains a remarkably deep, re-playable game that clocks in a good bit under an hour even at 4 players.

     2005 - Vegas Showdown (over Railroad Tycoon)
This could be the a Wizards of the Coast bias, but I think Vegas Showdown was quite a good game. It's the only one of the WotC-design Avalon Hill games that I actually like, so I can't be completely biased by having been there all those years. I still break this out and play it from time to time, both in person and over on GameTableOnline (where you can even play against an AI), and I enjoy it with 3, 4, or 5 players (which is actually a bit unusual for me). Meanwhile, I did want to call out Railroad Tycoon since I think it's quite a well-done train game. Probably the best train game of the decade, assuming you have a good space for setting up the massive board (edging out Ticket to Ride and Thurn and Taxis).

     2006 - Through the Ages
I have been playing the hell out of this game non-stop since I was introduced to it early in 2009. It is quite long (figure 90 minutes per player unless everyone really knows what they're doing, and even then it's still 4 hours for a 3-player game) and it is both complicated and unforgiving (unlike most other civilization-building games you cannot ignore military ... if you fall behind you will get crushed and never be able to recover). However, the hard-core gamer side of my crowd seems to agree with me that it is remarkably well balanced and the way in which you shuffle the decks and then draft the cards works out to give it a shocking amount of re-playability. I've now played around 50 games of it and I continue to be surprised by the ways in which games can evolve. A lot of the skill in the game is being able to improvise and take advantage of whatever opportunities the game has randomly presented you with. In that sense, it actually reminds me a lot of Magic (which I still consider to be the best strategy game of all time), only if Magic games took 4 hours to play themselves out.

     2007 - Agricola
A truly great "thinking" game and totally worthy of the #1 spot on Board Game Geek. It's got a lot of "fiddly bits," but I wouldn't cut any of them even if I could. The mechanics are tied together really well and this game shows once again how much re-playability you can get from shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing out some of the resources randomly. Interestingly, the German game critics who award Spiel des Jahres every year for the best "family style" board game called out a separate category for "Complex Games" so that they could acknowledge how good this was with a special prize.

     2008 - Dominion
Pure awesome, and I was glad to see it win Spiel des Jahres. The idea of constructing your deck on the fly by buying cards each turn that you then shuffle in so you can draw them on future turns is really brilliant. I wish the expansions were able to live up to the promise of the base game, but so far they have not. So far most of the cards in the expansions just make the game more complicated, which I guess might make some people happy as the original card set can start to feel like a solved puzzle if you've played it hundreds of times, however my advice is just to stick to the base game and to introduce it to all of your friends. If you're reading this blog then I'm sure all your gamer-friends will like it and even some of the ones who don't normally like games will probably like it too.

     2009 - Smallworld?
Here's where I'm supposed to end the blog entry by crowning a winner for the year that has just ended, but I'm not sure i have anything compelling to say. The Agricola expansion that just came out (Farmers of the Moor) seems really good, but I've only played it a couple of times and I'm not sure an expansion is supposed to qualify as the best game of the year (though this one might be a special case as it changes the game dramatically and the new game seems to be really good). Vlaada Chvatil's latest game (Dungeon Lords) has me pretty excited, and it does have a 2009 publication date according to the 'Geek, but it has yet to be distributed in the States so I haven't played it yet. I guess Smallworld is the best new game I have played this year. It's got some flaws (primarily that it's vulnerable to politics because using table talk to convince your opponents to attack your other opponents is very powerful), but the flavor is awesome and the mechanics are definitely fun as long as you aren't taking things too seriously. It you like multi-player Magic then I highly recommend it, but if you hate multi-player Magic then you probably won't want to play it more than 2 or 3 times. 

My top 3 overall for the decade would be Dominion, Agricola, and Through the Ages. TTA is my personal favorite, but the ordering of which I want to play at any given time changes completely depending on who I am playing with, how hard-core they are, and how much time we have to play.

There you go, the decade in board games from the perspective of a thinking gamer.

Between a the final table of the World Series of Poker, a Magic Grand Prix in Paris, and a couple of good college football games, today is shaping up to be a day full of checking in on the TV and the computer in between playing games with Kira.

I'm actually quite torn when it comes to (American) college football's lack of a championship game. On the one hand the gamer in me is horrified at how patently unfair the whole set-up is. It feels wrong that you can run the table without even getting a chance at winning the title, plus the lack of a playoff or a real national championship game both feel like lost opportunities. However, I have to admit that the set-up makes me much, MUCH more interested in every random weekend of games. If they actually had a playoff system, there's no way I would care about a random Iowa game on a random weekend in November. Without that playoff system, though, I was delighted to find it on ESPN 360, stunned to find out that Iowa's come-from-behind miracle-maker at QB was out injured, and watched much of the 4th quarter attentively as their national championship dreams ended.

Now I might have watched Alabama - LSU anyway since I went to school in the SEC (at Vanderbilt) and still follow SEC football and basketball reasonably closely, but the BCS implications raise the stakes significantly and turned it into must-see TV for me. All in all the fact that their system is patently unfair somehow works out to make it more compelling to watch. While I do love "March Madness," I also know in my heart that I watch very little regular season college basketball. And if there's enough people like me (and I suspect that there are), then can you really blame them for not having a playoff?

As far as the Grand Prix goes, I'm disappointed to see that martin Juza just got eliminated in the last round of day 1. 1961 players makes it the largest Magic tournament of all time, which is certainly a cool storyline to follow, but I feel like Martin has caught a couple of bad breaks this season and deserved to catch a good one here (esp. with Watanabe not in attendance). For those who don't follow Magic, the Player of the Year title is almost certainly the most prestigious title given out each year. Juza is in 2nd place despite being DQed on a pretty bad judge call late in a GP that he was poised to make Top 8 in, plus going 6-0 on day 2 of another GP only to discover that he missed Top 8 on tiebreakers because they weren't running enough rounds (a rule that has already been changed as of Paris). Anyway, seems like a really quality player and if he doesn't catch those two bad beats then Watanabe's 9-point lead would be much smaller, and possibly completely gone.

The WSOP always sucks me in as well. I think Magic is a more pure test of gamer-skill than poker, but the fan in me loves all the history and context around the World Series. As I type this Phil Ivey is chipping up nicely having risked moving his chips all-in once without getting a call already. I think they're playing down to 2 today and then they play the heads up battle late Monday night / Tuesday morning so that they can broadcast the final table Tuesday night on ESPN without having had the result scooped by that day's newspapers.

The winner gets $8.5 million dollars, but Ivey apparently has enough side bets going that if he pulls this off he would win another $6 million! In a weird way that actually means he could win more than the $12 million that Jaime Gold won a couple years ago, which is still the record for the biggest tournament payout ever (across any sport ever, if I'm not mistaken). I have found pokernews.com to be the best site for following hand by hand updates. I'm tempted not to follow it so that Tuesday's broadcast will be more dramatic, but they cut so much and I enjoy knowing the details of who is playing tight versus who is opening a ton of pots so I think I'll be refreshing all day.

And that's just Saturday! Tomorrow has day 2 of the GP plus I'm in two fantasy football leagues plus I still have to figure out who to take in my NFL "suicide pool" (where you must pick one winning team per week but you can never reuse a team). We're down to 5 people and I still have the nice, safe Indianapolis Colts available to me, but there's never going to be another week where Seattle is an option (they're decimated by injuries again this year, but they're hosting the dreadful Detroit Lions). I think I'm going to split the difference and save the Colts for later by picking the Falcons over the Redskins.

Looks like an in-person Through The Ages game is coming together for Sunday evening, plus I've got a couple of late night Dragon Age sessions to look forward to so it's going to be quite a fun weekend of not actually doing anything consequential.

What follows is a fairly stream of consciousness run-down of the games I've been playing for the last couple of months.

Through The Ages (TTA) has almost certainly been the thing I have played the most. It's essentially Civilization turned back into a tabletop game by Czech board game designer Vlaada Chvatil. It's not for the faint of heart (clocking in somewhere north of one hour per player), but it's remarkably well designed and well balanced. Well, it is once you know what you're doing anyway. The way in which you draft cards from a shuffled deck gives it remarkable re-playability, but only if you've learned that falling behind on military means almost certain death (the game is quite unforgiving if you fall behind). Lately my crew has been playing via e-mail using a Vassal module of the game in addition to playing it live. I've even got a spreadsheet now with our last ten results and counting. Mike Turian is the best - probably not a surprising result to anyone who has tried any form of drafting game against him.

Agricola is still in heavy rotation as well. Once I invest the time it takes to learn a game, I like to keep playing it. As a result my favorite games tend to be the ones with sufficient randomness in the set-up that each game is unique. That way, you learn some over-arching truths about what matters or what sorts of strategies tend to do well, but you're forced to improvise essentially every single time you play. Magic has this characteristic too — you're constantly learning new tricks that you can apply int he future, but you can never learn enough to just play by rote memory. In Agricola there's a nice core mechanic where you take turns deciding which action you want to do (somewhat similar to Puerto Rico, but with more options available). The real depth, though, comes from the deck of Occupations and the deck of Minor Improvements. You get a hand of 7 of each at the start of the game and much of the game-play comes from trying to maximize those resources while also reacting to whatever your opponents have put into play.

I know an Agricola expansion came out at Essen last week. It looks like they made some fairly major changes to the core mechanics. Has anyone played it yet? How is it?

Congrats to Donald X. Vaccarino and Dominion on winning Spiel des Jahres, by the way. That's a great game that I can recommend to just about anyone. The only thing resembling a complaint that I have about it is that the first expansion seemed a bit too busy as compared to the base set. I haven't had the chance to play the second expansion yet. Hopefully, he finds his voice and keeps this game fresh and vibrant for years to come.

I've also been dabbling in iPhone games pretty consistently. Drop7 remains one of my staple games, by the way. I know I recommended it before but it's really quite a nice game for anyone who has ever enjoyed Minesweeper, Tetris, or Sudoku. I kind of wish there were new goals to shoot for (a weekly friends leaderboard would go a long way toward keeping me invested), but even just trying to up my all-time high score and my average is enough to keep me playing in spare moments.

The other infatuation I had was a surprising one to me: I Dig It. It didn't seem like something I would like, but Richard Garfield recommended it so I tried it out. In retrospect I still don't understand exactly why i liked it, but I definitely did. I completed both the campaigns modes (each of which takes several hours of accumulated play, and that's after you figure out the basics and stopped accidentally getting yourself killed). The idea is that you have some sort of funky bulldozer that goes underground and digs up various valuable things - ores, gems, alien artifacts, etc. You start with a small gas tank, a tiny cargo hold, crappy radar, and an engine that overheats if you go very deep into the earth. As you dig stuff up and sell it, you can improve each of these things in what amounts to a fairly clever twist on the usual RPG level-up mechanic (flavored totally differently, and feeling totally different, but tapping into that same emotional love we all have of seeing our stats get bigger). It's more than just bigger numbers, though, you also feel more powerful. the kicker for me is that on top of all that there's this coolness that comes from building your own tunnel system. It's like a weird form of emergent gameplay — I'd never really thought about the most convenient way to dig mine shafts, but it was fun.

One game that I want to like is Dungeon Hunter. It looks like a fairly slick Diablo variant, and I played a ton of Diablo II back in the day. It's got nice graphics and seems to have all the action RPG goodness you'd want. I get occasional framerate issues on my 3G (which probably means it's great on a 3GS and bad on the original iPhone). My real issue, though, is that I'm stuck. If anyone knows where the hell the exit is from the Thamos Catacombs, please tell me.

In terms of tower defense games, I've played several lately. The Creeps has a cute mechanic where you have to attack the land around the track so as to clear spaces for future towers. Decent, but nothing earthshattering. Defender Chronicles is probably the tower defense game I have liked the most since finishing Field Runners. I like what they've done with altitude as an important consideration and it's well polished in addition. However, I lost a lot of interest in it once I realized that it's a grinding game — you have a hero who levels up as you play and it means that when you're having trouble with a level you probably just need to go beat the earlier levels again so you'll be stronger. Yuck. I want my tower defense levels to be self-contained puzzles that require me to be clever. Meanwhile, my office-mates at Mind Control all seem to love GeoDefense. I'm not sure why it failed to grab me, but the fact that several of them really love it means it's probably the one to check out if you only check out one of these (esp. since it has a lite version).

I've also been playing some with Zendikar on Magic Online. It seems like a decent draft format. It's quite fast, but I like the return to normalcy that comes from have 1 and 2 color decks, where it matters that you can read and send signals during the draft.

I've also played a ton of games with Kira — my 5-year old daughter. That's probably a subject worthy of a blog on its own, though.  Suffice it to say that she's now old enough to think strategically, which is super fun to watch evolve, and Pokemon is teaching her to do math.

I feel a little bit bad about neglecting this blog for the past few months, but it's actually mostly a good thing. It's a sign that my brain has been occupied with my job and I've been able to channel my excess mental energy into Project Mind Twist. I'll follow up shortly with a different entry about the games I've been playing lately, but enough people have been asking me how the project is going that I figured I'd just post about it.

As I posted here, Mind Twist is a free-to-play turn-based strategy game designed by Richard ...<< MORE >>

Miscellaneous thoughts and things I have discovered as I finalize my ballot for this year's Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame:

One guy who is getting some attention that I haven’t
mentioned before is Masashiro Kuroda. He’s got an impressive 121 points in just
13 appearances, by far the highest points / PT on the ballot. To be fair,
though, he’s got 7 GP T8’s factoring in there and his median PT finish is just
103^rd. Brian Selden is much more impressive to me if you want a
short-career guy: 3 T8’s and a win in just 14 PT’s attended, with ...<< MORE >>

The official press release announcing the collaboration I put together between Richard Garfield and Mind Control Software is going out today. In addition, there's a spiffy new website to promote the game plus you can now follow us on twitter (@TheMindTwist) and/or become a fan on facebook.

Soon (later today if I'm not mistaken) there will even be an exclusive interview about the project on Gamasutra with Richard and Mind Control's CEO, Andrew Leker.

The short version of all this is that I now have a job at a kick-ass independent video game developer called Mind ...<< MORE >>

(Pardon the dated-ness, but I was in some conversations about this last weekend and now I have a compelling urge to set my thoughts down somewhere ... which is the whole point of having a blog, right?)

So I was really enjoying the Celebrity Apprentice this season up until it turned into wrestling. I thought Trump was running a skill-game. Sure he made the occasional decision based on dramatic impact / ratings (usually keeping a controversial contestant around for a couple shows longer than they deserve), but in the end it seemed like by and large the best players won. However ...<< MORE >>

Marc Leblanc turned me on to this board game. He's one of the superstars at my new company, Mind Control Software, and he's also the kind of guy who walks around with an encyclopedia inside his head that seems to contain every game ever made, whether tabletop or digital. For example, here's the actual conversation where I learned that this game exists: I was singing the praises of Through The Ages. It's long and definitely not a game you want to try with your more casual board gamer friends, but totally worth the 1+ hours per person in my ...<< MORE >>

Wizards should be releasing the ballots for this year’s ProTour Hall of Fame any week now. I think this year is a “catch up” year. There are 2-3 obvious HoFers who are on the ballot for the first time (Antoine Ruel, Kamiel Corneleissen, and probably Frank Karsten) but after that I think we should allbe debating which old-timers deserve a spot. From my seat, that conversation boils down to Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz, Chris Pikula, and Justin Gary. You could make a case for a few others (Billy Jensen, Scott Johns and Mark Justice in particular) and folks will make cases that I don’t personally believe in for some other fine folks (Pat Chapin, Antonino De Rosa and Alex Shvartsman), but here’s the way I see it and the way I’m voting:

     The case for Chris

I like that the Hall of Fame is about more than just results. Chris had a decent career as a player - 3 PT Top 8’s, 4 GP Top 8’s, an Invitational win – but there aren’t enough slots available to let in everyone with that resume. Instead the case for Chris is all about the tremendous impact he had on the game as a personality and a community builder. I made this case in my year 1 ballot, and upon re-reading that I’m really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best things I ever wrote about the Pro Tour and I’d encourage you to go follow that link now.Seriously, I want to say all those things again, but I’m not going to be able to write them any better. I’ll wait.

In addition, we have an opportunity this year to try to right a wrong on Chris’s behalf. Lots of folks (myself included), think it was a mistake for Wizards to take away his Meddling Mage art when they reprinted the card. Let’s give Chris a ring to replace it with.

     The case for Steve

Pop quiz time: Who has more lifetime Pro Points – Mike Turian or Steve OMS? (The answer is Steve, at 237.) Who has more Grand Prix Top 8’s –Dirk Baberowski, Ben Rubin, or Steve OMS? (Steve has more than those two combined, 3 to 6 to 10.) How many people have finished Top 4 in two different Player of the Year races and then failed to get voted into the Hall of Fame? (Just Steve.)

I guess folks are looking at the mere 3 Pro Tour Top 8’s on Steve’s resume and deciding that somehow doesn’t measure up, but  that just seems short-sighted to me. If we decided to make a big deal about finals or semi-finals appearances then his 3would look really good (he’s got a 1^st, a 2^nd, and a 3rdin his three Sunday appearances). Meanwhile, if we were including Junior Pro Tour results in these stats then he would look even better.

Mostly, the case for Steve OMS is that for about 4-5 years he was one of the best couple of players in the game. He’s a bit overshadowed by his buddy Jon, but it was Steve who taught first the east coast and then the Pro Tour how to draft. It was Steve who won the most Grand Prix when Jon,Steve, and I became the first players to start traveling internationally for them. And it’s Steve who is the most deserving of a catch-up vote for the ProTour Hall of Fame this year. He finished 7^th, 10^th, and 7^ththe last three years so I think he’s got a very legitimate shot this year.

     The case for Justin

If you liked my year 1 ballot and you’re on a roll, here’s a link to my year 2 ballot as well. I think it’s decent, but I’m not as proud of it, especially since my statistical argument against Justin Gary is just wrong. The stat I was grasping for but failed to find at the time is “peak median finish.” Median finish seems like a good way in theory to judge which players were consistently good rather than which caught the lucky breaks necessary to put up a bunch of Top 8’s. However, median finish is dragged down by all the times guys will show up for Tour after their prime is over just because it’s fun to hang out and play. That shouldn’t somehow make them *worse* candidates, right? So take everyone’s best 3-year run and look at their median finish during that run … and Justin Gary in his prime is revealed as one of the best on Tour with an outstanding peak median finish of 25^th.That’s actually better than all five guys who got voted in last year, and the only person on the ballot with a better run is Mark Justice. Meanwhile, he’s also got two US national team appearances, including an individual win for himself and a team world championship.

Justin is competing with Karsten for a spot on my ballot right now. Their resumes are pretty similar with 3 Top 8’s each. Justin has the US Nationals performances but Karsten has 30 more lifetime Pro Points (280 to250). I suspect that Karsten’s writing and community building efforts will ultimately get him the nod, but I want to see the official WotC stats and listen to what others have to say about this year’s ballot before I finally make up my mind.

     Randy Buehler’s Ballot:

Antoine Ruel

Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz

Kamiel Corneleissen

Chris Pikula

Justin Gary / Frank Karsten