The January Effect

The scholars of financial markets say there are some upward anomalies, regarding positive returns, which occur in January. This is known since 1942 (!), is more notorious in small and young companies, but it still isn’t fully understood.

Christmas optimism that extends into the coming year, application of results, search for non-traditional investment opportunities, incomplete information. Whatever the causes, the market seems unable to eliminate the phenomenon, which keeps repeating itself.

They call it: The January Effect!

This is, therefore, an appropriate moment to return to the stock market, in a version of the 1970’s, from Portuguese Publisher Karto.

The portfolio of shares, duly signed, dated and beautifully illustrated, consists of titles, representing 1, 5 or 10 stocks, from five Portuguese renowned companies, all from different sectors:

TAP – Transportes Aéreos Portugueses, the flagship airliner;

Lisnave – Estaleiros Navais de Lisboa, Lisbon shipyards;

Sociedade Comercial Guérin, car importer and seller;

Companhia de Seguros A Mundial, insurance company;

Banco Pinto & Sotto Mayor, bank.

Each player-investor seeks to obtain the maximum return, multiplying the 25000 Kartos, the local currency, held at the beginning of the game. In order to do that, one has to buy and sell stocks, change share prices, receive bonus, if lucky enough, or, more often, pay taxes on capital or on shares.

There may be also extra dividends for the holders of securities whose prices rocket and go over the top of the scale. And bankruptcies, whenever quotations fall down below the acceptable minimum.

Pay attention, for there are no exclusivity rights. Each player may hold shares from any number of companies. Temporary alliances, for mutual benefit or prejudice to a third party, are just around the corner!

Prices do not vary randomly, but as a decision of each player in turn: first, through the card he picks from his hand; then, through the definition of the actual meaning of each star on it – stars representing stocks at player’s choice.

Double or halve the price; raise two titles 800 kartos and lower three by 500; raise TAP 600 kartos, and move two titles down, by 300.

Downgrade share prices in order to buy cheaper, or to harm opponents. Raise them up to make a profitable sell out, afterwards, or to reduce the profit perspective for those who buy expensive shares. Focus your investments in one or two titles, to have greater control. Diversify and be exposed to constant fluctuations. And adapt the strategy to the unpredictability of card drafting.

Cards also determine the motion of a token on the outer band of the board. And it will be the next player in turn the one who will bear the responsibility to comply with the instructions of the space where the token ended!

Another element to consider for choosing the right cards, when the attribution of bonuses to opponents, paid in shares or in cash, the settling of different types of taxes, or even the impossibility to perform any transactions, is at stake.

A game in which you need to do some math, as shown in the rules. Adding and subtracting, a few multiplications and a few percentages (10% or 50%, nothing too complicated)..

Pssst ... don't use your mobile phones! It’s just arithmetic’s 101, to be worked out by the players themselves or, if you prefer, by a player who may take the role of banker.

A simple and fun game, with a scent of a return to the past.

Jogo da Bolsa. [The Stock Exchange Game]. Karto.

Season's Greetings

Glen More

Highlands. Clan lands. Isolated villages between mountains and lakes. Castles and abbeys. Stone and wood. Pure wool and cattle. Cereals, distilleries and whiskey barrels. This is the Scotland of the late 17th century, where Glen Mor is located, the Gaelic for Great Valley, home to the lake Ness, yes the one and only, Loch Ness, as well as Loch Oich and Loch Lochy.

To set-up the right ambiance you better find a kilt, read the rules with Scottish accent, add a lit fireplace and taste a good malt from the Inverness region, such as Glenmorangie, which sounds very appropriate.

Set up for three players

At first your territory is just your village, with a single clan member and a handful of coins. No wood, stone, grain, cows or sheep. You will need to do everything!

In each game turn, you can seek to expand your territory, activate terrain tiles to produce resources, buy and sell on the market, and even promote members of the clan to chieftains.

Each territory tile has specific characteristics. From quarries you obtain stone, of course; for sheep, you will need meadows; pasture, for cattle; forests, for wood; cereal fields, for grain. And there are also fairs, grocery stores, slaughterhouses, bridges and taverns.

And finally, there are special tiles, some with immediate effect, triggered when they are placed, as Loch Oich, that allows you to activate all your tiles at once, or only at the end of the game, as Iona Abbey, scoring points for certain types of tiles.

The goal is to get victory points, which are associated with barrels of whiskey, chieftains and caps, or special cards.

Expanding the village

All this variety allows for very different strategies. But things are only starting to get interesting.

Firstly, you don’t take turns always along the same order! The player in turn is the one at the rear of the chain on the central board, where new tiles are picked.  In the example above, regarding the set up for three players, it is now the turn for the blue player. And here begin the dilemmas: advance further to reach a strategic card, running the risk of not playing for multiple turns until, yet again, be the last in order, or take a smaller step and run the risk of another player taking the wanted piece?

Then, because many of the tiles have associated costs and you must have the right resources, at the right time.

Finally, because there are three scoring rounds throughout the game, a feature which will challenge short term options, regularity fans or those pursuing victory down to the wire.

At the market

The matches with two or three players were not forgotten, by introducing an extra "ghost player”, the dice, which will randomly remove some of the tiles waiting to be picked, and thus elegantly maintaining the typical uncertainty of the games with a larger number of participants.

Overall, a great game in a small box, where at the end everything fits well and tidy.

Back into the box

Cramer, Matthias. Glen More. Ravensburg: Ravensburger Spielverlag, 2010. Alea, Bernau.

PAW in Uganda

Playing Twilight Imperium

By kind permission of Ben Parkinson, The Butterfly Project - Developing youth social enterpreneurs in Africa.
More information on the project available here.

PAW, Playing Around the World. Step in and leave your PAW print by sending a photo of a game session, name of the game, your name, city, country (and, if you feel like, a short sentence) to gamesinbw@gmail.com. Follow the PAW tag.

Igrok - The Gambler

"There was a tremendous crowd in the gaming-rooms. What an arrogant, greedy crowd it was! I pressed forward towards the middle of the room until I had secured a seat at a croupier's elbow. Then I began to play in timid fashion, venturing only twenty or thirty gulden at a time. Meanwhile, I observed and took notes. It seemed to me that calculation was superfluous, and by no means possessed of the importance which certain other players attached to it, even though they sat with ruled papers in their hands, whereon they set down the coups, calculated the chances, reckoned, staked, and—lost exactly as we more simple mortals did who played without any reckoning at all.

However, I deduced from the scene one conclusion which seemed to me reliable—namely, that in the flow of fortuitous chances there is, if not a system, at all events a sort of order. This, of course, is a very strange thing. For instance, after a dozen middle figures there would always occur a dozen or so outer ones. Suppose the ball stopped twice at a dozen outer figures; it would then pass to a dozen of the first ones, and then, again, to a dozen of the middle ciphers, and fall upon them three or four times, and then revert to a dozen outers; whence, after another couple of rounds, the ball would again pass to the first figures, strike upon them once, and then return thrice to the middle series—continuing thus for an hour and a half, or two hours. One, three, two: one, three, two. It was all very curious. Again, for the whole of a day or a morning the red would alternate with the black, but almost without any order, and from moment to moment, so that scarcely two consecutive rounds would end upon either the one or the other. Yet, next day, or, perhaps, the next evening, the red alone would turn up, and attain a run of over two score, and continue so for quite a length of time—say, for a whole day. Of these circumstances the majority were pointed out to me by Mr. Astley, who stood by the gaming-table the whole morning, yet never once staked in person.

For myself, I lost all that I had on me, and with great speed. To begin with, I staked two hundred gulden on "even," and won. Then I staked the same amount again, and won: and so on some two or three times. At one moment I must have had in my hands—gathered there within a space of five minutes—about 4000 gulden. That, of course, was the proper moment for me to have departed, but there arose in me a strange sensation as of a challenge to Fate—as of a wish to deal her a blow on the cheek, and to put out my tongue at her. Accordingly I set down the largest stake allowed by the rules—namely, 4000 gulden—and lost. Fired by this mishap, I pulled out all the money left to me, staked it all on the same venture, and—again lost! Then I rose from the table, feeling as though I were stupefied."

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Gambler. Translated by C. J. Hogarth. Ebook #2197, 2009, The Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2197/2197-h/2197-h.htm

Quarto

Let’s line up!

The board has sides with four spaces.
Therefore, it's not a tic-tac-toe.
Make a line of four, yes, but with a few extra dimensions.

Because each piece has four distinctive characteristics.
Circular or rectangular in shape section.
Tall or short.
Light or dark.
Solid or hollow.

This multiplies the possibilities to line up the pieces.
Based on color or size.
In the shape or in the filling.

And then, there's an extra detail that makes all the difference:
You can't choose a piece and put it on the board …
You chose the one that the opponent will play!

Time to view the board under a different light!

Muller, Blaise. Quarto, Boulogne-sur-mer: Gigamic, S.A., 1991. Ludo Mania.

Battle Games

Books of the 1970’s, here in the Spanish version, when the novelties came across the border.
Books with history, with stories and games.

Firstly, some handwork, with scissors, cardboard, glue and colour crayons. Detach the centre pages, containing the rules and parts; cut the pieces; stick them on cardboard, or assemble them, if  required; add a bit of color, to give an extra ambiance; and even, in some cases, laminating, to protect from wear.

Afterwards, the rules, a single sheet of paper, always simple but diverse. 

And then: play! In different episodes of history, different geographies or even futuristic scenarios.

Hunting buffalos on the Vast Prairies

Facing Billy the Kid in Lincoln County

Jousting at the nations tournament

Under siege!

Juegos de Las Batallas 1 – El Salvaje Oeste
Juegos de Las Batallas 2 – Caballeros em Guerra
James Opie. Usborne Publishing Ltd., 1975. Barcelona: Plaza & Janes, S.A. Editores, 1977.

Mod: Flamme Rouge

How about changing the rules of a game?
Can be as much fun as playing.
Can make the game more fun.
This is the theme of Mod series.
Propose modifications.
Eliciting opinions.

Today with two proposals on Flamme Rouge, the cycling tactics race, on its way to the final sprint.

Mod 1 - Follow the leader

In Flamme Rouge, all players choose, simultaneously, the motion card to be used for each rider. Suspense and unpredictability guaranteed! 

But, what if ...

What if, as in real life sprint, who is in the lead is at a disadvantage? 

What it is easier to follow the wheel in front and be able to react? 

In this Mod, players play sequentially, starting with the leading cyclist and continuing throughout the road positioning. The only situation of simultaneous card choice occurs for cyclists that are side by side. 

To increase the adrenaline, for the levels of a peloton rolling at 60 km/h, it is suggested that the cards are played in quick succession!

Order of play

Mod 2 – A longer lead train 

This is a variant designed for two players and using nothing more than the elements of the game.

In this case the teams grow with the drafting of a new rouleur, and the respective cards, from one of the colours not in use.

This makes two teams of 2 roleurs and 1 sprinter, increasing the possibilities of teamwork, to launch the sprint or to try the victorious breakaway!

Launching the sprint

Try it and comment!

Granerud, Asger Harding. Flamme Rouge. Lautapelit.fi, 2017. MEBO Games. Lda.

PAW at Los Angeles

Waiting for the players
Lake Balboa, Los Angeles, USA, 2018

Leave your PAW print: Playing around the world. Send a mail to gamesinbw@gmail.com, 
with a photo of a game session, name of the game, your name, city, country (and, if you feel like, a short sentence).

Shape of my heart

I know the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art

But that's not the shape of my heart

He may play the jack of diamonds
He may lay the queen of spades
He may conceal a king in his hand

While the memory of it fades

Sting and Dominic Miller, Shape of my heart, in the album "Ten Summoner's Tales", 1993.

Le Tarot de Marseille, Fournier, S.A.
Costa Pinheiro, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisboa 1990.
Gainsborough Playing Cards, E.E. Fairchild Corporation, Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A.

Tsuro, the game of the Path

“Build your Path through discovery and chance. Quiet your mind. Your journey begins here.”, one can read in the parchment. The box, dominated by red and gold, the rule book, the cards, the tokens with the Dragon in relief, the board. So beautiful! So many delicious details! Behold, Tsuro, the game out of the Path, a creation of TomMcMurchie, illustrated by Shane Small.

But the journey will be anything but quiet! After all, the goal in Tsuro is to be the last on standing over the board, causing the opponents to leave it or to collide with each other. And the more the merrier, in a game up to 8 (!) players!

The board starts empty, with the tokens placed on the edge at a point freely chosen, and with three path tiles making the players hand.

In turn, each player chooses one of his tiles and places it in front of his token, which then travels all the way, never going back, until it reaches a free spot, i.e., a space without a path tile.

Straight ahead!

The paths, which at start are independent, quickly become shared, and each move can use tiles already on the Board.

A long stroll to the top right corner

But beware, all other markers that in contact with the new tile path, are also moved along the new path, until reaching a new free space! Unless the path will drive them off the board. 

White comes to the bottom left corner
Red finds its way out of the bottom border

Or even to a head-on collision. In both situations getting  knocked out of the game.

Unavoidable collision

With two or three players it is possible to play in a more strategic way. With six or eight, mayhem strikes fast!

A simple game, elegant, fun, fast to learn and play, enabling to gather up to 8 people, of any age, around a small board. The game of the Path.

McMurchie, Tom, Tsuro, Compound Fun, 2009. Calliope Games.