The Tao of Gaming

The Tao of Gaming has moved. Update your bookmarks accordingly.

Which means I have a month (or so) to decide whether to continue this somewhere else, or just confine my ramblings to BGG/SABG or other sites....

I could move to blogger or wordpress, I suppose.

From time to time I get inquiries about buying ad space here. (This makes me rethink capitalism, so I'll give you a moment to goggle and wonder).

In general, the answer is no. Unless you can make me break down like Crusty the Clown ("They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house! Waaa!") I'm not interested, for a variety of reasons but mainly because this is my hobby and I've seen too many people sucked into making it a profession and it rarely ends happily.

I think I've mentioned this before ... and the great and powerful Oz agrees.

That's right, my blog started roughly four years ago ... in another milestone, I finally broke the 1000 games rated mark, thanks to Joe "I just made a geeklist of terrible games that all right-thinking people have forgotten" Huber for pushing me over the hump, at a small cost of mental anguish.

In other news, Chris Farrell has moved his blog.

We do this for love, baby!

According to my profile, I've played 10 different games in the last 30 days. ~70 games of Race, and nine other titles once each. [The other nine include sitzkriegs as R-Eco, Loco, Apples to Apples and Geschenkt!]

Larry Levy waffles about the Designer of the Year here. I look forward to his political post where he endorses Clinton, McCain, Obama and "That weird one."

I haven't forgotten the Master Solvers post, but I'm a) waiting for it to die down and b) wishing for a one-armed economist. As for doing more, well, send me the problems and I'll post them. (I'll watch for interesting draws ... I could do mid-games, but that means a lot of typing to get the setup).

Another idea I'd considered is running an annotated PBEM. If you want to play, shoot me an email, but you have to write up your reasoning with your plays. I'm not convinced I want to do this yet, as my wife is already giving me strange looks.

Update: As to how the PBEM would work (as there have been questions). I'd shuffle a deck (make an excel spreadsheet of the deck, assign each card a random number and then sort the card based on those). I'd also have to create a file for the "open" position (everything except hands) and email it out seperately. Obviously commentary would only be revealed after the game (or perhaps a few turns delay would suffice). Ideally most players would send in their role selection, I'd send out the update (along with any explore cards) and then they'd send back builds/consume/produce to minimize traffic. Toward the mid-end game players are probably more likely to want to see each build before continuing.

Close your eyes; take a deep breath; relax.

I'll be travelling for a few days.

I'm tanned, rested in ready.

But the hotel is different than last years. I don't remember it having a computer to use (and I'm not taking a laptop). So I have no idea if I'll be posting.

So I leave you with your intermission entertainment. And yes, that was just posted recently.

As noted in an early comment, my old website is gone. (I got the webspace as part of a deal with a UNIX shell and dialup ... and I have DSL now). I've migrated my old reviews to Boardgamegeek. I move content over after a reasonable lag.

Just like movies go to cable first. Only premium content here!

The Tao of Gaming is pleased to announce Tom Lehmann will guest blog. (Here's thegames he's designed, , and Joe Huber wrote a profile of Tom). I've known Tom for several years, and enjoy our discussions.

Tom will post as the mood strikes. I'm not going on hiatus, we have no schedule. (Writing on a schedule smells like work).

Enjoy!

And yes, I did play games tonight, but I'll write about that later.

Update: The urge to make significant editorial changes won. I haven't altered any meanings (I hope), but I did clean up what struck me as poor writing.