I’m liveblogging this from SocialMediaCamp. We’re halfway through the day and so far it’s been a great event. Lots of interesting talks and a great atmosphere.
One of the sponsors of SocialMediaCamp is Bview and they’re holding a competition to win 99% off anything you want (up to £500)! You have to write a blogpost about it before midnight tonight and email them at competition@bview.com.
So: What Would I Do With 99% Off Anything I Want?
Ooh, tricky question. There’s still so many gadgets and things I’d like to have. A PlayStation 3. A video camera (maybe something simple like a Flip). A Nintendo DSi. A voice recorder (people who follow my tweets will know why). Another camera lens. More shoes (how can you not want more shoes?!). More clothes (again: how could you not want more clothes?!).
I finally figured it out though: something that’s lately taken up a lot of my time. If I could get 99% off anything I want, I’d get:
The Ultimate Geeky Boardgame Collection!
I’d try to get as many of the best boardgames as possible, filling my house with boardgame madness. I love the site boardgamegeek.com and they’ve got a top 100 list of the highest rated boardgames. I don’t own any of the top 25 and I would love to get as many from this list as possible!
I know, I know, it’s already more than two months after Christmas, why this post? I’ve been meaning to blog about it for some time, but the scan I had of what you’ll see next didn’t come out right. So I had to wait until I got my hands on it again, to finally do this post.
To explain things first a bit, my family celebrates Christmas a little bit differently than most. Because we’re Dutch and Australian, it’s a bit of a mix of traditions. In the Netherlands you usually don’t celebrate Christmas, but Sinterklaas, which is the 5th of December. One of the traditions is that you do a sort of Secret Santa with your family (or with friends or at school), but also have to write a poem and hide your present in a “surprise” (pronounced the Dutch way that would be sir-preez-suh), a handcrafted something. I’ve had to do this a couple of times for school, making fake cactuses from paper and a teletubbie doll from clay and felt.
Anyways, my family has never done the ‘surprise’ part, but at a certain moment (when me and my siblings were old enough) we did do the rest, but moved it to Christmas. So on Christmas day we do the usual presents under the tree, but also a Secret Santa with poems. Now some years I’ve done gimmicky ‘poems’. A poem for my brother a couple years back included cryptic clues to where he could find his presents. Another one for my brother was part in code. One poem for my mum was set on the tune of “O Holy Night”.
So this year my brother got his revenge. One of the presents under the tree was this little puzzle (it’s a Hanayama Metal Cast puzzle, called NEWS):
Plus the following poem and puzzles (click here to see a bigger version):
I had so much trouble figuring this all out! I managed to solve a couple of clues, by the power that is Google, but I did need some help from my brother. Some of these clues led to other clues, some which helped with other parts I hadn’t solved yet.
Before writing up a post on what all the clues are and how to solve it all, I thought I’d give you, dear readers, a chance of figuring it out. Two clues are Dutch/English language related, but they’re not even necessarily needed to solve it all. There are basically two type of clues in the ‘picture’: 1. clues that will lead to more clues that will lead to eventual instructions in how to open the NEWS puzzle, 2. clues that are actually instructions on how to open the NEWS puzzle. Plus there’s also the encrypted word at the bottem KPIRVWZIV, which is where my present was hidden.
So, do you think you can solve any of the clues? Just brainstorm in the comments and I’ll let you know which ones are right and what leads to other clues.
Regular readers will know how much I love puzzles and games. I haven’t done that many game reviews on this blog, but I want to change that. I’ll be reviewing old and new games I’ve played. And not only video games! I’m going back to basics with board games and social games, cause some of these games are just as much fun (sometimes even more) as sitting behind a computer and killing each other (not that that’s the only thing you can do with video games). Plus I find not enough people play these type of games nowadays, which they should!
To start this off, I’ve chosen Carcassonne, a board game I’ve been addicted to these past weeks.
Title: Carcassonne
Type: Boardgame
Number of players: 5 (but with a certain expansion added: 6)
Cost: £15-£20 for the basic game (depending on where you get it)
Carcassonne starts with a single tile in the middle of the table, portraying part of a medieval landscape. All other tiles are shuffled and placed face down in a stack. On each turn a player draws a tile and places it adjacent to another tile already on the table. Tiles must be placed in a logical way: roads must extend roads, fields to fields, cities to cities. Simple so far, right?
Besides drawing and placing tiles, every player has seven ‘meeples’, wooden follower pieces to score points. After placing a tile, a player can decide to station a meeple on that tile. The meeple must be placed on a specific feature – road, city, field, cloister – and may not be placed if that feature has already been claimed. Whenever a feature is completed, a player scores points.
The game ends when the last tile is played and the player with the most points wins. And that’s all there is to this game. The basics are so simple, you don’t really need a lengthy explanation to start playing. Kids will grasp the basics just as quick as adults and there aren’t a lot of rules to remember. The game play itself can be quite quick and easy, depending on who you’re playing against. The way we play it though, we tend to take ages trying to figure out what’s the “optimal” spot to place a tile.
What I really love about this game though is the number of expansions available, each changing the game in unique ways. For example, the River expansions replaces the single start tile with a river of a couple tiles long (all that changes in game play is the amount of options at the start). With the King and Scout expansion, there is an extra set of points for the player with the largest city and largest road. I love the Traders and Builders expansion, cause it adds two special meeples: one to score extra points in the fields (in the form of a little pig, called affectionately a ‘peeple’), and one to be able to draw an extra tile per turn (a “builder”, so a ‘beeple’). I’m simplifying it a bit now, but each expansion creates a different dynamic to the game and by combining expansions you can tailor the game to exactly how you like it.
If you like the sound of this definitely try out the basic set, or try to grab me at the next BarCampLondon. I’m going to bring it with me then to play during the overnight and maybe even do a session about it.
Regular readers around here should know how much I love (attempting) to solve puzzles. Alternate reality games and other stuff like that I mainly love to do, because of the fun of solving those type of puzzles. I still have to blog about a puzzle quest my brother set up for me as a Christmas present (the photos I made of the “puzzle” didn’t come out right, so that’s why there’s a delay in this post), but suffice to say I’m completely addicted to them.
Anyhow, another fun game (not sure if I should call it a ‘game’, but I can’t think of a better word) that fits with my addiction is MacHeist. The main idea behind MacHeist is the sale of the MacHeist bundle, a collection of Mac shareware applications (for only $49). What I love about it though is in the weeks leading up to that sale, there are the MacHeist missions, filled with puzzles, a great storyline and free Mac apps.
The real missions haven’t started yet, but there’s a nanoMission available already. The first part of this has a link to a lockbox and has the following description:
All you need to solve this puzzle is in the picture. The puzzles after this one are pretty easy too, but trust when the real MacHeist starts it will get more complicated.
Check it out at MacHeist.com and solve the next puzzle!
Lately I’ve been addicted to the game of geocaching. Calling it a “game” though doesn’t seem right; it’s not what you’d typically call a game. I like to consider it more of a current day techy treasure hunt.
Geocaching is a treasure-hunting puzzle-solving type of game, where people hide and look for secret containers (called geocaches) with the help of GPS. Some caches are straightforward: the clue is a GPS location, you go to that location and the cache is hidden somewhere there. Others can be a bit more elaborate, where you first have to solve certain puzzles and riddles before you can find the cache.
The sizes of the caches also vary; in some cases these caches are tiny (see picture below), containing only a strip of paper to write down your name to show that you’ve found the cache. Other times it can be an actual box and people leave items behind for others to find.
The first cache I ever found was in Portobello Road (check out the cache details here) and the result was the above nano cache. It’s a nice and easy geocache to start with, cause the instructions to find it are pretty straightforward.
Another geocache hunt we did was for the second London Geek Meet. This one was all about spotting Space Invaders, cute little alien tile pictures that are part of a world wide street art project. We were supposed to find 12 Space Invaders and each of these would lead to a clue needed to solve the location of the final hidden cache. In the end we solved all the clues and found the final location, but failed in finding the geocache there. If you ever want to do something a bit fun and different around central London (it starts in Covent Garden), definitely check this hunt out.
Finally last Sunday we finished a Geocache hunt I’ve been wanting to do for some time. It was based in Regent’s Park and would lead to a geocache hidden at a secret garden within Regent’s Park. A couple of weeks ago when we did the photo shoot with Carlo and Fabiana, I solved the first part of this hunt and calculated where the location was.
I was expecting that it wouldn’t really be a secret location; I’ve been to Regent’s Park often enough and I thought I had seen most of the places. But this truly was a secret garden. Plus it was beautiful. And this was on a very rainy day in the winter; I can only imagine how this must look with luscious green in the summer. Even if you’re not interested in finding the actual geocache, it’s worth doing this hunt alone to find that secret spot (check the details here).
So far I’ve been doing these geocache hunts with my mobile phone. I don’t have GPS on it; I just use Google Maps for approximate locations and although not very precise, it works well enough. I’m not completely addicted to this yet that I need a GPS unit, but if I ever find a cheap device, I’m definitely getting it. The problem is that most GPS devices are so expensive because they show a map and directions on them. What I’d want though is just a simple gadget that can tell me what the current GPS location is (beeper size, maybe?). Does anyone know if something like that even exists?
All in all, geocaching is a fun little game and a great way to discover new locations. I’ve already found some instructions to caches hidden in the Netherlands, around where my parents live. Let’s see if I can convince my brother and sister to go geocache hunting with me!
I’m still not completely sure what I think of the sit-com The Big Bang Theory. For those who don’t know this TV series, it’s about two nerdy, geeky housemates and the pretty but slightly dumb blonde who moves in across the hall from them. On one side it’s aiming very much to the geek crowd, with insider jokes only geeks will understand. On the other side though it features stereotypical geeks and makes fun of them.
All that aside, in this week’s episode Sheldon explains the rules to Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, a variation of the known game Rock, Paper, Scissors:
Apparently it’s been around for some time already (invented by Sam Kass), and has been floating around as a internet meme. Here are the rules one more time:
I’ve been meaning to write about this conference for more than a week now, but things have just kept on popping up. As I said in a previous post, Playful was a different type of games design conference, not only featuring game designers (in fact, I think there were only two that were actually just that), but mainly people who were passionate about games and had a different perspective to game design.
I arrived slightly late (ugh, public transport), so I missed the intro from Toby Barnes and most of the talk from James Wallis. I got to see all the other presentations though and all of them gave a really unique view. In total there were 15 talks, each of them 20 minutes long. I won’t try to describe every single presentation, instead I’ll highlight the ones I found most interesting.
Guitar Hero Hacking
Roo Reynolds had a cool talk about how he used ControllerMate to interpret the Guitarhero/Rockband guitar “buttons” and pass it on to GarageBand. The result was being able to use your GuitarHero guitar as an actual instrument and create and play your own (or other people’s) songs. His slides and audiocast are up on Slideshare. Here’s a short clip of Roo playing Hotel California:
Games and Music
A nice (and completely unintentional) followup to Roo’s talk was Matthew Irvine Brown‘s presentation. He talked about the similarities between how you learn games and music (how you learn how to play a game and how you learn to play music, like reading notes and scales). He had done a couple of experiments to see how people could learn music principles through a more game like structure.
In one experiment Matthew took brass band type of instruments like trumpets, trombone and tuba, and created Guitarhero-like plastic controllers. In another he used a breath controller as the controller for a small remote control car (exhaling/inhaling in different degrees caused the car to go left/right). Finally Matthew had another experiment with a singing sock puppet (see this video to see what I mean), which got these type of reactions from people:
Addiction
Adrian Hon normally talks about Alternate Reality Games and that type of game design, but for this conference he wanted to do something different and not rehash an old presentation. So he talked about addiction and his own experiences with it. He told us how a couple of months ago he decided to play Team Fortress 2. Now the cool thing of that game is that you can play in clans with people, so Adrian found a fun clan to join and played regularly with the same group. Only problem: the clan was based in the US, and their standard playing hours were 1am-3am.
After a while Adrian had trouble sleeping and chose for a weird solution: drink alcohol. Apparently for him alcohol would make him sleepy, so he’d drink a couple of beer/wine/(I don’t remember what exactly) every time he would play at night. At one point though it came so far that he’d also drink on the nights he didn’t play. It wasn’t a lot, not enough to think “oh, I’m a alcoholic”, but eventually he realised he shouldn’t be drinking like that. So he stopped with the drinking and consequently with Team Fortress 2 too.
212 Box and Mystery on Fifth Avenue
Eric Clough is an architect with 212box (based in New York) and he first gave a couple of examples of cool design stuff his company had done. The main one that everyone was interested in though was Mystery on Fifth Avenue (check out the New York Times article). Eric explained a lot about this apartment, highlighting a lot of things not featured in the article.
A Playful Stance
Kars Alfrink gave a interesting presentation and a different take on design. The documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys is about the beginning/birth of competitive skateboarding. Skateboards at the time (1970s) were seen as a land-bound pastime for surfers, nothing more. A group of kids took these skateboards and combined them with the empty concrete round swimming pools to create a more acrobatic and exhilarating game. They basically took these existing objects and created their own game with it. Kars proposed that games shouldn’t be designed, but instead tools should be designed with which people can create their own games.
Hardware Hacking
In this talk Matt Biddulph showed the results of hardware hacking and playing around with electronics. He first explained how it was possible through products like Arduino and that basically you can hack anything together you want with some basic soldering skills. He showed examples like Johnny Lee’s Wii hack, the Tenori-On, the BBC Dabagotchi and the DSBrut.
There were 9 more presentations, each giving a unique and cool perspective to game design. Check out some other blog posts about Playful: Digital Consultant, Roo Reynolds, James Wallis. I’m hoping most of the talks will be uploaded, cause I did see a camera recording everything. All in all, it was a great day and I look forward to next year’s event.
About a year ago there was a contest called ‘Let’s Change The Game‘, where teams had to submit their ideas on how to design an Alternate Reality Game to help cancer research. The team that won would get money and help from the best ARG designers in the world to implement their design. Operation: Sleeper Cell is the game the winners came up with.
In Operation: Sleeper Cell you are an Agent for The Agency, a secret organisation dedicated to making the world a better place. After registering you can try to solve missions that others have already unlocked. Some of these missions can be online puzzles, for which you have to find the answer. Here’s one example:
Tuesday, 7:45pm. Through delicate contacts (the frail man in the fish section of the local supermarket) I’d managed to arrange a secret meeting with a contact who claimed to have inside information on E.V.I.L’s current status. And here we are, me and my contact “Rachelle” sitting opposite me in this quiet multicultural restaurant just down the road from my flat. Problem is, I noticed on my way in that one of the chefs has changed just for tonight, and so has the usual menu. I can’t help thinking that one of the items is out of place, but my six European languages are not what they used to be.
The menu reads:
1. Smazené Zampióny
2. Caracoles con Queso
—
3. Filet de Poisson du Jour
4. Fettucine alla Boscaiola
5. Homard Froid Ostendaise
—
6. Schokolade-Gift-Torte
7. Lepeshka s Medom
Before I order for us both, is there anything I should avoid? Enter the full name of the dish.
Other missions can be “real life” assignments like going to a Cancer UK 10K run dressed as a spy or recreating a James Bond scene with friends, stuffed animals, lego or anything else you can come up with. Besides these already unlocked missions, every week some locked missions are released. These can only be unlocked if you donate or raise money to “buy” these missions. The person or team (after registering you can join a team and play with your friends) that bought the mission has a 12 hour head start to solving that mission.
I’ve been playing now for more than three weeks and it’s been great fun. It’s surprising how the missions can be simple and difficult for different people. There were some puzzles I was stuck at for ages, that others got in one go, and yet other puzzles that I found easy that others couldn’t figure out.
If you want to play too, just go to the Operation: Sleeper Cell website and register as an Agent. There will still be six more weeks of missions and it won’t be too much trouble to catch up with all the already unlocked missions. I’m playing under MissGeeky for Team Marsh-Ayre Mob (the We Tell Stories survivors). Even if you don’t want to play, how about sponsoring me and donate some money to cancer research? Just go to this link and follow the instructions.
I love the Super Mario games. They were the first real console games I ever played. I still have my trustworthy little NES (plus the Duck Hunt gun) and it’s something I’ll never sell or give away.
I got a ticket to Playful today and it’s one event I’m really looking forward to. To quote the Playful website:
Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. The event aims to promote lively debate on the nature of games: what they mean to different people – both inside and outside the industry.
Besides the ‘traditional’ area of video games, there are also so many other forms of games out there. Board games, alternate reality games, social party games (like Werewolf), there are lots of people designing these games and even more playing them. The Playful event brings key practitioners from all of these different game areas together, exploring how to make the games medium more meaningful to more people.
Just check out the speakers list, it will show the variety of all the different backgrounds and fields of the participants. I’m very curious to see Eric Clough‘s presentation. Remember the Mystery on Fifth Avenue, the New York apartment that had a game hidden within it’s architecture? Clough was the main brains behind that. Two other speakers I also look forward to seeing are Adrian and Dan Hon, the guys behind Perplex City and We Tell Stories. I loved playing those games, so I’d like to hear more about the design behind them. These three are only a glimpse of the great lineup of speakers that are confirmed for Playful.
So when, where, how, you ask? Here are all the details:
When: Friday October 31st Where: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London [map] Price: £25 (Buy Ticket) Speakers: current confirmed speakers
and on 
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