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Goals for 2014
2013 Was a great year for me. So I’ve decided to have some big goals for 2014. Normally on a Friday I review a game or post a Design Me challenge. But since it is still the first week of the year I’m taking this opportunity to share my goals for the rest of 2014. Let’s start with the Barley goals…
The Barley Goals:
In 2013 I brewed my first four batches of beer. They were an Amber Ale, Honey Ale, Oatmeal Stout, and Scotch Ale. I can do better than that, so my first Barley goal of 2014 is:
#1: Brew 6 Batches of Beer
I received the Northern Brewer Caribou Slobber kit as a Christmas present, so that will be the first brew of 2014. I will plan to brew it on the first day when the temperature is over 35 degrees since I brew outside with a turkey fryer.
Other styles of beer that I’d like to brew are:
- Hefeweizen
- Oktoberfest
- Pumpkin Ale
- India Pale Ale (for my hop-forward friends)
- Winter Warmer
In 2013 I named by beers after renaissance men. In 2014 I will be naming them (and hopefully labeling them) with board game related things. I am going to work on a Boards & Barley label that I can put onto the bottles and make them look more official. I’ll likely have way too much fun with that.
#2: Get away from brewing with kits
Beautiful raw ingredients!
I have an awesome beer brewing store close to where I work. They have buckets of different types of barley and malt. I wish I had asked for a beer recipe book for Christmas. So my goal is to tailor at least three of the beers listed above to my own particular recipes. For example, I would likely soften the hoppiness of whichever IPA I want to brew so that it is more drinkable by people like myself who don’t care for overly hopped beers. So by getting away from using beer kits I can free myself to make the beer however I want it to be.
#3: Branch Out
This refers to my beer consumption. It’s easy to drink only the few styles or brands that I know I enjoy. So in 2014 I want to branch out and be willing to try many different styles of beer. I’ll be keeping a list of the beer styles that I enjoy throughout the year and hopefully have a sweet beer report at the end of 2014.
The Board Goals:
While the Barley goals are all something that I know I can accomplish on my own, board game goals are more dependent on other people. You need playtesters, publishers, artists, etc. With that in mind I am setting board game design goals that I believe I can accomplish without those other people. For example, I could set a goal of getting a game signed, but that would require a publisher to help me accomplish the goal. However, if the goal was to design a “signable” game, then that is something that I can accomplish on my own. Rule for life: set yourself up to succeed. So these are goals that I can accomplish without requiring publishers or artists.
#1: Print on Demand – The Game Crafter
POD FTW!
One big goal of mine is to put two games up for sale on The Game Crafter. Why would I want to do this instead of approaching a publisher? Because game design is all about fun. I think it would be a lot of fun to create a couple of games that people could buy directly without having to wait for a kickstarter campaign or for distribution or whatever.
So I want to take two designs, create my own original artwork, and post them to TGC. The first one I post will likely be Quantum Orcas. With the recent improvements to the design I believe the game is getting close.
To make the goal “achieveable” I plan to post one game to TGC in the first six months of 2014 and the other game in the later half of 2014. This is something I’m pretty excited about. I’ve used TGC to make prototype stuff, but never to sell my own games. It should be fun!
#2: A Heavy Game
While Scoville will be a “big box” game, the design of the game is quite simple in nature. In 2014 I want to design a really heavy game in the realm of the Uwe Rosenberg games. I want there to be a high level of player interaction and an intense decision space. I want each decision to feel uber important. And I want to spend a long time balancing cards/events/scoring options. Seth Jaffee recently posted an article about balance that will help me approach a heavy game like the one I want to design.
This is a tough goal since so much goes into big game designs. Fortunately I have two friends on board to co-design with me and I have a theme in place already. I’m excited to see how things develop throughout the year.
#3: Pitch a Game
I’ve never really pitched a game. Scoville sort of pitched itself thanks to the kind words of the awesome people at Protospiel-Milwaukee last March. My third boards goal for 2014 is to have a game that is pitchable, and to actually schedule a meeting with a publisher and sit down to pitch the game. This is one of the most interesting parts of being a game designer. Can you also be a salesperson? I hope to find out in 2014.
#4: “Finish” Some Lingering Game Designs
You’re going down, Trading Post!
Coming up with a game idea and making a prototype are the easy part of game design. It’s the playtesting, modifying, balancing, and other stuff that make game design challenging. I have numerous game design concepts that I would like to “finish” in 2014.
“Finish” is an interesting word since, like most art, how do you ever know if you are actually finished with something. I like the rule of thumb where you could consider a game design “finished” if someone says they would buy it. So that will be my measuring stick for 2014.
I particularly want to finish three designs: Trading Post, Brooklyn Bridge, and Conclave. I think all three are unique enough to warrant my time and effort to “finish” them. We shall see!
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So to recap, I want to brew 6 beers and design (or finish) 6 games. That works out to 1 brew and 1 board game every two months. I think I can do that, but I’d better get to work!
Did I leave anything off the list? Are there things you would like me to do in 2014?
Also, what types of articles would you like to see on this blog? I didn’t set any specific blog goals, but I plan to continue providing mediocre content on a regular basis. If there are topics you would like to see, please let me know!
Newton’s Oatmeal Stout
On Boards & Barley I tend to focus on the Boards side of things. But today is a Barley day! Why? Because I just bottled my oatmeal stout and I feel like writing about it.
Most of you probably don’t know this, but there are many scientific discoveries that were made by brewers. In fact, it was a brewery in London during the sewage problems of the 1800s that provided insight into the bacteria problems in the water. The people at the brewery were not getting sick because they only drank beer, which had undergone a boiling process. Those around the brewery were getting sick from the unsanitary water that was plagued by rotten sewage. But enough about that.
Oatmeal Stout
What is a stout beer? Stouts are dark, sometimes bitter beers that are brewed with roasted barley and malt. The barley is often roasted to the point of charring. This provides a “burnt” type of flavor that can often taste like coffee or chocolate. These beers can be all over the map in terms of hoppy-ness. But the main character of a stout beer in the roasted flavor.
An oatmeal stout is a variant of a stout beer that is brewed with steeped oatmeal added to the steeping grains. The addition of the oatmeal gives this variant a sweeter, smoother finish. Also, these have a more mellow character than a standard stout. The roasted character, however, remains in the beer. Some popular oatmeal stouts include Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout and Young’s Oatmeal Stout.
My Beer: Newton’s Oatmeal Stout
Way back on September 11th, in honor of our awesome country, I brewed beer. It was my first time brewing a beer while using the steeping grains. Basically the steeping grains add about 30 minutes to the brewing process. You put a bunch of crushed grains like barley and malt into a sack and soak it in hot water for about 20-30 minutes. Then this becomes the base liquid for the boiling wort.
The sack of steeping grains sits nicely while providing beautiful character to my beer!
After you’ve steeped the grains, which is rather like steeping a tea pack in hot water, though on a much grander scale, then you can begin to brew the beer. The kits I have used have said to bring a gallon of water up to 170 degrees and use it to rinse the grains. So I simply pour the gallon over the grain sack and catch the water in the boiling kettle.
The wort boils for about 45 minutes, during which time the hops are added. After 45 minutes you’re basically done. You bring the beer down to about 115 degrees and add in enough water to bring it to about 5 gallons. Next you pitch the yeast, which is a fancy way to say you add yeast to the liquid. Then seal it up with an airlock and you’re good to go!
The original or starting gravity of my stout was 1.047. This isn’t a very high gravity, but stout beers aren’t known for being high gravity beers.
After a week in the fermenter I transferred the beer to a glass carboy. I let it ferment and age in the carboy for about three weeks and this past Sunday I bottled it.
Bottling is the worst part of the process. I don’t buy bottles, so I have to de-label them, which is a big pain. Then you’ve got to make sure your 45-50 bottles are clean, so I run them through the dishwasher without detergent. After that I sanitize them using One-Step. In the meantime I transfer the beer back to the plastic fermenter, dissolve bottling sugar, add the dissolved mixture to the beer, and then I proceed to bottle 10 at a time and cap them.
For this batch I ended up with 46 bottles, one of which will remain on my shelf for all time. Doing a little math, if an average 6-pack costs $8.50, which seems on par with my FLBS (Favorite Local Beer Store), then 45 bottles (7.5 6-packs) would cost about $64. The beer brewing kit itself cost about $42. So I am saving $22! That’s a considerable amount. The downside is that I have 7.5 6-packs of the same beer. Is that $22 worth having so much of the same beer? (It is worth it if you can bring it to game nights and drink other people’s beer!)
My Newton’s Oatmeal Stout had a final gravity of 1.015. This means that the beer has an ABV (Alcohol by volume) of 4.2%. Therefore I should be able to slam a bunch of these bad boys and feel little effect.
Why Newton?
I like to name all of my beers after Renaissance men. In my opinion Renaissance men are not necessarily from the Renaissance. Rather, these are people who happen to be experts or masters in many trades. Sir Isaac Newton was definitely a Renaissance man.
I could have chosen a pudgy character who more closely fit the bill of being “stout.” However, Newton seemed to fit the bill of being “stout” due to his contributions to science and his place in history. I suppose I could have saved Newton in case I ever brewed an apple ale, but I don’t think I’ll ever brew an apple ale. So Newton joins my Renaissance fleet that already includes Leon Battista Alberti (Amber Ale) and Benjamin Franklin (Honey Ale).
In a couple of weeks a new Renaissance man will join the team behind the guise of a Scotch Ale. Unfortunately William Wallace is not technically a Renaissance man, so I’ll have to choose a different Scot as the namesake for the beer.
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If anyone has questions about brewing or beer styles or anything having to do with zymurgy, please let me know!
Monday Brews: 10-14-13
Welcome back to Boards & Barley! So glad to have you here. Last week I posted an article about using Inkscape to make icons for your game design prototypes. It appears that the article was pretty well received. If there are other things you’d like me to show how to do in Inkscape, just let me know!
Today is Monday, so I present to you the Boards & Barley that I enjoyed in the past week:
The Barley:
Freshly bottled awesomeness!
First some news: last night I bottled my third batch of homebrew. It is an Oatmeal Stout and will be named after Sir Isaac Newton. So in a few weeks I’ll be able to enjoy some Newton’s Oatmeal Stout. The picture shows the beautiful bottles of awesomeness. They will be waiting patiently in my basement.
New Glarus Spotted Cow: Yum.
Tyranena Rocky’s Revenge: This is a very good beer that comes from Lake Mills in Wisconsin. The upside is that it reminds me and my friends of the great Beer Run event that the brewery holds each November.
Hinterland Oktoberfest: Not good. This hoity toity beer was not a good Oktoberfest. It did not even taste like an Oktoberfest. Served in 16 ounce bottles at a high cost by a brewery that thinks it’s high end, I expected something better. Disappointed with this one.
New Holland Dragon’s Milk: Wow! Not necessarily a good “wow.” Just Wow. This beer is potent. I’ve been wanting to try it for a while and it lived up to expectations. This beer had a ton of character.
New Belgium 1554 Black Ale: New Belgium has some interesting beer styles that I don’t always enjoy. However, the 1554 Black Ale is definitely one that I do enjoy. I have to wonder, though, if that’s because it makes me think of Euro style games. This beer could have a theme based on the black plague. All it would need is some bored looking dude on the label!
Point Oktoberfest: This is a passable oktoberfest, which is saying quite a bit compared to the Hinterland oktoberfest listed above. It’s not my favorite oktoberfest, but I’d drink it again.
The Boards:
Camel tokens from Yspahan are awesome!
It was another down week for gaming. But this week we’ll be having a game night, so hopefully I get a few more games in this week.
Kingdom Builder: Somehow I sneaked out a win over my wife. With a final score of 84 to 81 it was a closer finish that I was expecting. I was surprised when I saw how close she was.
Yspahan: I got to play Yspahan for the first time this past week. And I snapped this awesome picture. The game is a really cool game design despite the possibility of dice results ruining it. I pulled off a big win and really enjoyed the game.
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So those are the Boards & Barley that I enjoyed last week. What did you enjoy?
Monday Brews: 9-16-13
First things first: Happy birthday to my good friend Jeremy (@JeremyVanMan). I hope you have a great day!
Second, it’s Monday, which means you’re probably having one of the worst days of your week. And that’s why I present The Monday Brews to you weekly. Hopefully by reading what I enjoyed over the past week you can forget about work for a few minutes and remember the fun games you played this past week.
So here’s the Boards & Barley that I enjoyed this past week:
The Barley:
Have you ever tried to kick a pumpkin???
Ben Franklin’s Honey: I was able to enjoy my second to last of this homebrew while homebrewing. As Charlie Papazian says, “Relax and have a homebrew!” There’s nothing better than enjoying one of your hombrews while you’re homebrewing.
Leinenkugels Oktoberfest: Now that the temperatures are dropping this seems like a more appropriate beer choice rather than like two weeks ago when it was 90 degrees. I love the oktoberfest style and attending Oktoberfest in Germany is definitely near the top of my Bucket List.
New Belgium Pumpkick: Now that fall is nearly upon us it’s time to start enjoying spicy pumpkin beer. The New Belgium approach to pumpkin beer was an excellent one! Some pumpkin beers are just too pumpkinny, but this one was very nicely done with a subtle presence of pumpkin. Nicely done, New Belgium!
Great Dane Stone of Scone Scotch Ale: The scotch ale style is quickly becoming one of my favorites. I used to consider Belgian styles as my favorites, particularly Tripels, but my palate is changing. This was brought to my house in a growler and was thoroughly enjoyed.
New Glarus Staghorn: This is a local Oktoberfest style brew that the aforementioned Jeremy considers the best Oktoberfest there is. I cannot disagree. This is an excellent beer and I look forward to Autumn so that I can enjoy this particular beverage.
The Boards:
6 Player Kingdom Builder Variant of Awesomeness!
Kingdom Builder x3: I’ve been loving this game since I bought the Crossroads expansion at GenCon. I think that the new expansion is a very nice addition to the game. And we also made a 6 player variant that would also work for 8 players. The picture shows the setup we used for 6 players. We played with three teams of two. You would work together and the final scoring would be done based on your two teams colors together. Yet the adjacency rule only held for your own color. I may write this up as a session report on BGG because it worked so well.
The Little Prince: I can’t get enough of this game. We taught another new player and he enjoyed it despite not doing very well. It’s just so clever. On the flipside, I wouldn’t mind a retheme. Get on that, internets!
Skyline: When looking for fillers, this game has been our pick of the poison lately. It’s simple. It’s quick. And it’s fun. My only complaint is that I wish the base dice, middle dice, and top dice were different colors. That would make it just a bit easier to see what dice you are actually using. But it’s a very fun game.
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So that was the Boards & Barley that I enjoyed last week. What did you enjoy??
The Monday Brews: 8-5-13
Another week has left us. And what a glorious week we have upon us. Just as we are gearing up for GenCon it turns out that I have a birthday this Friday! So of course this week will be a good one. I suppose I should try to get some playtesting in so that I’m not taking garbage to GenCon. But we’ll worry about that later.
Here’s a recap of my boards and barleys from the past week…
The Barley:
Capital Brewery Supper Club: This is an excellent beer to enjoy when you’re not worried about anything. Sit back, put your feet up, and realize this beer’s “not bad.”
O’So Big O: This was another decent beer to enjoy while relaxing. It had a little tanginess, but that didn’t hinder the enjoyment. This beer is from the wonderful town of Plover, WI.
Ben Franklin’s Honey: I again enjoyed some of my own homebrew. However, I have a big problem. I am almost out of my own beer and I don’t have a batch currently fermenting. We are approaching mission critical here. I’d better start brewing!
Here’s glimpse of a cooler I was able to rummage through at a party I attended this weekend. Some of the better beers were in a different cooler.
Some excellent Wisconsin beers. One not-so-excellent Wisconsin beer. And then there’s Corona.
Horny Goat Watermelon Wheat: Rule #1: No fruit in beer unless it’s a Lambic and it’s done correctly. Rule #2: If you’re using fruit in beer, please just not watermelon. Yeah… I didn’t care for this beer and won’t be having it again.
Pabst Blue Ribbon: Out of reverence for fellow game designers that I had the privilege to meet at Protospiel-Wisconsin, I hoisted a cold PBR this weekend. And I realized that it wasn’t that bad. I’d have another, especially if it was available at GenCon!
The Boards:
Unfortunately I didn’t get to play as many games as I had hoped. Here’s the three that I did manage to play:
Tsuro: My friend’s $1.20 thrift store find has made the table a bunch lately. And we got it out again this past week. This is a great filler game that doesn’t take much though, has minimal downtime, and is also fun to play. unlike last week we didn’t have a three-way tie for the win.
Guillotine: This is a fun card game where players try to get the most points over the course of three days. During each day different cards are placed on the table. On a player’s turn they can play a card from their hand, and then they must take the card closest to the guillotine. The card they played hopefully allowed them to put a better card in that spot so that they didn’t have to take a bad one. It’s a pretty fun game despite some dude’s butts on some of the cards.
The Settlers of Catan: We always have fun when we play this game, even with 6 players. When we play with 6 I get to use my two different versions and the table looks pretty funny. But it’s always a fun game, even if I know I’m going to lose after the initial placement phase. Here’s a picture of our setup:
Mish-mash at its best! Excuse the blurriness.
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Another week under the belt. What Barley or Boards did you enjoy this past week?
Boards and Barley 