gwax's rumblings

About a week ago, I under­took the project of cat­a­logu­ing my Magic: The Gathering card col­lec­tion and I finally fin­ished ear­lier today. I am using a pro­gram called Magic Suitcase to do my cat­a­logu­ing. The goal is to improve improve my aware­ness of what cards I have and my abil­ity to con­struct decks. Having com­pleted my cat­a­logu­ing endeavor, I am now able to use the appli­ca­tion to get sta­tis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion on my col­lec­tion. Following is a spat­ter­ing of infor­ma­tion about my collection:

	Total Cards: 10,886

	Gold: 97
	Artifacts: 725
	White: 1677
	Blue: 1665
	Black: 1690
	Red: 1692
	Green: 1667

	Lands: 1699
	Artifacts: 725
	Creatures: 4194
	Enchantments: 2006
	Sorceries: 750
	Instants: 1511

	Rare: 522
	Uncommon: 2175
	Common: 8189

There, that ought to be far more infor­ma­tion than you wanted as regards my Magic card collection.

This was the end result of a Scrabble game that my friend Dave and I played a cou­ple nights ago. I post because it’s the first 300+ point game of Scrabble I’ve ever played.

The blanks were ‘B’ in “RIBBING” and ‘S’ in “QUALMS”. The final score was Dave: 308, George: 305.

I’ve been look­ing for a game to amuse myself (and oth­ers) with that’s a bit more com­plex and inter­est­ing than the stan­dard fare. My cur­rent inves­ti­ga­tions have led me towards the likes of Nomic, Double Fanucci and Mornington Crescent.

Double Fanucci is a card game from the Zork series of games. As things cur­rently stand, Double Fanucci is thor­oughly unplayable because I nei­ther have a deck of Double Fanucci cards nor do I (or any­one else) have any idea what the rules of Double Fanucci are. Some infor­ma­tion about the game can be found at wikipedia, Encyclopedia Frobozzica and Do-It-Yourself Double Fanucci. If I could man­age to get a Double Fanucci deck, it might be inter­est­ing to try to con­struct rules but, until then, there’s not much to be done with regards to Double Fanucci.

Mornington Crescent is a game devised by the BBC radio show I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue. The game is either easy or hard, depend­ing on whether you get what’s going on or not. The object is fairly sim­ple: be the first to get Mornington Crescent sta­tion. Mornington Crescent is a throughly playable game, as long as you have some cre­ativ­ity, a sense of humor and know how the game works. In order to learn a bit about the game, take a look at Mornington Crescent Illustrated with Expert Play. Once you give up try­ing to fig­ure out what’s going on, take a look at what wikipedia has to say about the game (bit of a spoiler). This is a game that I should like to find oppor­tu­nity to play some­day despite know­ing the trick behind the game.

Nomic is the most playable of the three, being com­pletely real and hav­ing clear, well-defined rules. The inter­est­ing bit about Nomic is that the rules are mod­i­fi­able dur­ing the course of play. The plas­tic nature of the rules is the inter­est­ing fea­ture of the game and makes for very open-ended game play. To get started, take a look at the inventor’s Nomic page and his descrip­tion of Nomic (includ­ing the ini­tial rules). Also, Nomic is pretty pop­u­lar so you can eas­ily find plenty more info on the rest of the web. Nomic, being thor­oughly playable, is some­thing that I hope to con­vince some peo­ple to join me in play­ing some­time in the near future.