My plant closes down for the holidays every year, and although there are many more productive things I might be doing during my time off, I usually end up spending much of the time hunched over my laptop either working on my websites or figuring out how to get obscure games running on the various flavors of operating systems I use. I’ve managed to squeeze a goodly amount of both pastimes in over this year’s break. I’ll let the site updates speak for themselves (check ‘em out!) and spend more time talking about the games I played.

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I’ve been looking forward to picking up a copy of ‘The Settlers’ and decided to cruise over to Men at Arms Hobbies (Middle Island, NY) with Emily in order to do so. Those of you who knew me ‘way back when’ know that we used to spend a lot of time at Jim’s picking up figures or rule books for the various games we used to play. It was great to hang out with Jim again and talk about some new games.

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I caught an NPR commentary today by Russell Roberts, an economist at George Mason U. Roberts was on about Monopoly being a bad model for the business world in that it portrays capitalism as only a Marxist would see it. He pointed out several of the idiotic assumptions in the game, and mentioned a far better game model in ‘The Settlers of Catan’. In these ‘German-style’ board games, “…players compete, but they also co-operate and trade in various ways…” teaching how to build wealth and success in a more realistic way, with greater emphasis on strategy and negotiation. I had to check it out…

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