Board Games!

Life continues to be perpetually hectic, however, I have resolved to take one day off per week (Sunday). Working 7 days a week for over a month was pretty darned tiring, and I while I think that I accomplished a lot, I don't think that anyone would disagree with the idea that it's not worth giving up your entire life, no matter how much you enjoy your job.

I got a nice piece of news a few days ago: The final paper based on my Ph.D. research has been accepted for publication into BMC Biology! This was the one detailing the work I did on my 'major' project, i.e., the one that took me 2.5 years of work. I want to blog about it, but given how infrequent my posts have been of late, we'll see if I actually get around to it. Acceptance of this paper is really nice, because it means that I can focus 100% of my effort on my postdoctoral work - it's very typical for people starting up postdocs to be finishing up Ph.D. stuff on the side for a year or more. I still have one review paper regarding my Ph.D. that I'm in the midst of writing, but unfortunately, that's not a huge priority at the moment.

As my previous blog post alluded to, I've been 'going out' a lot lately. Aside from all of the sleep and hang-over related issues, such behavior is also quite expensive, and I've been looking for alternative, cheaper ways to spend time with friends. Hence, we're trying to get a board gaming group together!

I received a copy of the German game Settlers of Catan for Chimmz. Catan is really popular and well-known with the board game crowd, but if you're not familiar with the game, it's a pretty relaxed and easy-to-learn game involving the colonization of a small island. Each player takes control of a different colony, placing settlements at the intersections of different land tiles that randomly produce resources as gameplay progresses. Players then use the resources in order to expand their colonies and interfere with those of their opponents.

Part of Catan's extreme popularity has to do with its relative simplicity (it can easily be learned in an evening) and its quick play (games last around an hour - depending on the number of players, 3-4, though there's a $20 expansion set that increases the number of players to 6). Some board games can get far more complicated than Catan, but those are only for the extreme hardcore crowd. Catan's really something that anyone can enjoy, and I've been surprised by how many people I've met who play it.

One of our rounds of Catan in progress.

After getting my ass whupped in three rounds of Settlers (I hadn't played in a while and my strategy was abysmal...), our host pulled out a French game called Caylus, which was considerably more advanced, but also very, very cool.

In Caylus, players take the role of nobles tasked with building a castle city for a medieval French Monarch. Each player controls a pool of workers who must be distributed among a series of tasks such as trading in the market, laboring for money, building additional structures in the castle/city, or petitioning the local provost to allow/disallow building of certain structures among many others. As players complete tasks in the game, they're awarded victory points - determining the ultimate victor - or royal favors, which boost the player's ability to more efficiently distribute his/her resources.

There's a lot to think about during each round of play, and there are a few aspects to Caylus that make the game stand out. For one, there's no 'randomness' to the game: every aspect of the game is determined by how players choose to distribute their resources - there are no dice rolls. Each location on the board can only serve one player per round, and thus players have to take turns competing for limited spots. Players even invest resources in order to determine the order of play, so it really is a fine balancing game.

Caylus's playing field. Although it looks pretty crazy complicated, it doesn't take that long to get the hang of it.

I have to admit that it was all quite overwhelming at first, however, it really didn't take that long to get the hang of it. Again I got my ass beat, though.

You'd assume that people in science are generally all quite nerdy; but such is not the case. I've had surprisingly little opportunity to play such games, even though I really do enjoy them. Good board games tend to be rather expensive (> $40 and sometimes much higher), which is fine as long as you play them a lot. Despite the fact that I suck at them, I hoping that we'll have a lot more chances to play these games while I'm here!