Equality Of Opportunity, Not Outcome

For some, it's a difficult concept to grasp.  How can things be essentially equal if one person has advantages that another does not?

Well, it's kind of like rolling 3d6 in order, six times.  Everyone has the opportunity to be a titan of strength, intelligence, etc. but we all know that it's random.  You get what you get.  Sometimes the Gods favor you, other times they kick you in the balls.  That's life.

Now, if you were to make everyone's stats pretty good but not great, regardless of what was rolled, that would be equality of outcome.  This is attractive to some because they don't want the risk.  They want an easy "B."

But then, of course, everyone in the party pretty much has the same stats.  You lose individuality.  You also lose any sense of scale.  If everyone has the same thing, then that "B" might as well be a "C" or even a "D."  Without the highs and lows, those stats are relatively meaningless.

That which is attained without struggle has less value.

Especially when you consider the GM's plight... or obligation.  One of his many jobs is to challenge the PCs.  If everyone has good stats, then some villains will have to have even better stats to compensate.

Anyways, what we're after in life and in gaming is a fair shot, a decent chance.  Don't hand your players good ability scores just because you don't want anyone to feel bad.  Make them work harder to compensate for their PC's shortcomings.

What about the super-rich kids that inherent all their parents' wealth?  They didn't have to roll the dice in life.  True, but someone always gets really lucky.  Anyway, overconfidence and a sense of entitlement are their own weaknesses.

Actually, that reminds me of legacy PCs in the Knights of the Dinner Table comicbook.  Ensuring that newly generated PCs get certain advantages from the very beginning... and that shall be the topic for my next blog post!

VS

ELEGANT BATHROOM + DOWNLOAD + TOUR + CC CREATORS | The Sims 4

Continue Reading »

A Week In The Life

My weekly scheduled as a hobby game store owner is based on the needs of my business, my personal needs and desires, along with financial considerations. I could afford right now to not work at all, to not go into the store. However, I have the same problem as every semi-retired person. If you don't go to work, then what?

That does not mean I'm financially independent, only that I've created a system that works independent of my continual input. As I don't have a better use of my time, it is best spent maximizing the value of the business until I have my 'then what" answer. That answer might be a second business, a second location, or who knows, I might buy a boat and sail off into the sunset and work remotely. I spent a bunch of time writing a book in 2017, so there are answers to these "then what" questions.

Do you dread going to work on Mondays? So do I! So I don't go. I work from home Mondays, placing orders online from about 7am to 1pm. That's a decent day of work for me, but to be entirely honest, I could send off this entire workload to distributors to do this job. Many store owners do this, and when I'm on vacation, I do it as well. However, I think manually ordering every single item ties me into the store "hive mind." I may not play as many games as I would like, but I know what's hot, what's available, what isn't and why. I know things.

Tuesday is shipment and meeting day. The vast majority of the stuff I ordered on Monday shows up on Tuesday. Having next day arrival means we can rely on just-in-time delivery -- probably a little too heavily. I would like to have about 20% more inventory in the store and we could probably double the inventory, if we had the money. As we're paying down debt, we run lean. We only stock best sellers and we drop the bottom 20% to make room for what's hot. There is always a bottom 20%. The store makes over seven figures in revenue, despite only stocking the best of the best.

On Tuesday, I help receive all those things I ordered, another way I feel connected to the store when I'm essentially off the sales floor most of the time. I learn what each thing is, get an idea of the value proposition now that it's in my hand, and get a chance to see where it fits in the store. Later on I go to lunch with my manager. We have an agenda of items we go over as part of our process improvement plan. I'm usually responsible for about 20% of those items and the rest go to the manager and staff. My job is to remove obstacles and occasionally take over thorny issues. We make a point of doing this every week and the goal is to constantly "fill the hopper" with new issues. It's a process I learned from Dave Wallace.

Wednesdays and Thursdays are slower days and I'm there with just my assistant manager. The idea is I do mostly office work during these days, along with covering for him and helping customers. As we grow larger, I expect I'll have extra coverage these days, freeing me up to do more officey things, whatever those may be. Thursdays are also order days, but as I may get pulled away from those if it gets busy, I often spend Wednesday night placing my orders for a couple hours. In fact, if I'm home at all, I'm often logged into the point of sale making adjustments and tweaks pretty much all the time.

Fridays are another receiving day, like Tuesdays, but not nearly as heavy. Before construction, I used to take half the day off and go to the gym and the range, but the financial burden after construction meant I dropped those activities. I'll usually do a little office work, help with receiving, work with customers and if it's slow, take off a little early. I'm not really needed, which was great today (Friday), because I'm home sick (I was sick yesterday, but had to go to work anyway).

Saturdays are a big day for the store. In year four, I got weekends off and one of the goals of the manager was to keep me away from weekends. That was by design. Saturday morning I'll get an email from my main distributor of all the new items that week. I'll spend a couple hours researching each one and send that in. I do not look at email solicitations, the "dailies" restock listings, or other day to day buying related communications. I pre order absolutely everything for my store so I can free myself from the daily burden. If I look at a daily, I'll buy stupid crap, guaranteed. If I talk to you on the phone, I will likewise make bad buying decisions. I need to research at home, in a calm manner, with my POS history open, over a long period of time.

Sundays are off, right? It depends. During the holidays, while traveling, of if I know I won't be in any condition to place a Monday order, I might spend my ordering hours on Sunday instead of Monday. I will also be checking the POS constantly to see what's going on, making sure events are firing, items are selling, and checking performance metrics on sold items. I don't really need to do this, but it's part of my taking the pulse of the business.

Could I save money? My manager and I just talked about coming in Mondays to save money, but having that one day off is both a luxury and a bit of a necessity. I get a lot of work done at home that day.

Could I work less? You bet. I went on vacation for two months. I delegated my buying job to my manager and spent about three hours a week managing the business. Most of that included my finance work, making sure we were paying bills and had enough money in the bank.

My time on-site is pretty low, about 20 hours a week, maybe 30 when it gets busy (like last week with our ding & dent sale). My time running the business, if I'm focused on that, is probably a full 40 hours a week, with a lot of time spent on the laptop at home. That's sub optimal work, as I can see when I'm on vacation. While on vacation, a few hours a week course corrects, but it would be foolish to think I could do that all the time. How much time could I spend away before it all began to break down? That's an interesting question I may one day answer. This may all sound rather lazy, but the less reliant the business is on my being there, the more value it possesses. So my goal is to maximize value in a fashion that's independent of me. I wish to be highly effective while also being dispensable.

I've got a job I enjoy with an environment I've crafted, with a management team I've selected. I can take trips when I want of just about any length, provided I can afford them. There's not much better than that when it comes to actual work.

Quick Review - Harbour: High Tide Expansion By Tasty Minstrel Games

Harbour: High Tide
Designed By: Scott Almes
Published By: Tasty Minstrel Games
1-4p | 30-60m | 14+

Quick Review - Harbour: High Tide expansion by Tasty Minstrel Games
DisclaimerSupport me on Patreon!

Harbour was the very first hobby game I backed on Kickstarter, way back in 2014.  It was delivered two months early and was my very first unboxing post on this blog.  It quickly became a favorite game, especially for solo gaming, and still hits the table as both a solo and multiplayer game occasionally.  I really enjoy how the market fluctuates and how the one-worker, worker placement mechanic drives player interaction.  So when I heard that, after over 5 years, there was going to be an expansion for Harbour, I was super excited to be able to try it out!  So, is the High Tide expansion going to elevate Harbour to new levels or leave you with wet feet?  Read on to find out!

Harbour: High Tide is available right now for just $10 (or less).  Ask for it at your FLGS.  It contains 30 cards and rules in a tuck box.

High Tide is a small expansion that you can get for $10 or even less from your FLGS now.

Overview:

High Tide doesn't really change much about the overall mechanics in Harbour; the overall gameplay is still the same with you moving your goblin worker from building to building, gaining resources, and selling them at the right time to buy buildings for yourself.   The only major mechanical change in High Tide is the new Ship cards, although the new two-story  buildings and other new building actions add some interesting new decisions, abilities, and interactions.

New buildings and fun ships add some new elements to keep Harbour interesting.

In each game there will be several ships available for hire instead of taking a building action.   To hire a ship you'll need to spend some goods.  However, unlike shipping all your goods to buy a building, goods used to hire a ship are adjusted on your resources track 1 to 1.  When you hire a ship you'll place it in front of you.  Later, you can return the ship to the table to get a $4-$6 discount when buying a building.  These ships are great for giving you extra options for spending goods when the market changes are not in your favor.  They also make some of the more expensive buildings a bit more accessible (and there are several expensive buildings in the expansion).  They also serve to speed up the game slightly since they let you buy cheaper buildings easier, too.  There are 9 ship cards included, 5 of which will be available in a 4-player game (4 for 3-players and 3 for 2-players).

When you hire a ship you'll get a discount for purchasing a future building.

In addition to the  ships, High Tide includes 21 new building cards that have some interesting actions.  One minor change in the mechanics is in how buildings get added to the building row.  Adjacent matters for some of the new building abilities, so their order matters.  The building row works like a river now, with new buildings being added to the left and the rest sliding to fill any gaps when a building is bought.  When you buy buildings they go in front of you from right (your start building) to left.  This spreads things out a bit of you are used to squeezing things in when you have limited space.

A whole slew of new buildings have new abilities that use the ships, new adjacency rules, interesting scoring, and more!

On  the new buildings are two new symbols.  A bright green emblem with a ship symbol on it indicates a small business.  When you buy these you may buy them like a standard building, or you may purchase it at a $2 discount and use it as a second story for a building you've already bought.  When used as an upper level business they don't count toward the buildings that trigger the end game.  The other symbol is a pink emblem with an arrow on it.  When you buy one of those buildings you'll get to move your goblin worker to another building and take another turn.

The green icon lets you build this as a second story (yes, you can have cows living upstairs). 
The pink icon lets you take another action after buying the Dairy Farm.
Dairy Farm also has adjacency rules (you get livestock when someone uses an adjacent building)
You also get bonus points if someone owns the Cheese Shop.  The Dairy Farm has it all!

Some of the new buildings also give variable points at the end of the game.  Depending on various criteria the buildings will be worth a different amount of points.  For example, the Dairy Farm gives you seven points, but if someone owns the Cheese Shop you'l get an extra 2 points.  Or, the Dock Builder gives you 3 points for every boat that is still out for hire by anyone at the end of the game.

Dock Builder gives you a bonus when ships have been hired and extra points if ships are hired at the end of the game.

That's all that's new in the High Tide expansion.  It's a small expansion for a small game, but it's enough new stuff to breathe some life into an old favorite.  I really like the ships and how they provide an alternate strategy.  And some of the building abilities are pretty interesting.  Like the Escape Room that may trap you there for several turns, but gives you a big boost of you are lucky enough to get out quickly.

It's not a perfect expansion though.  There are a few building abilities that aren't the clearest, and whether you physically replace buildings like the Ghost Ship without changing location or add the replacement building to the left of everything like you do other times a new building comes out isn't explicitly stated.  However, my biggest issue with the expansion is that it isn't compatible with the inland traders side of the market board.  This, by itself, isn't a problem, but the expansion cards have nothing on them to indicate they are part of the expansion.  So once you've shuffled the new buildings into the old deck, good luck ever separating them.  If you really like the inland traders variant you might want to consider marking the expansion cards before shuffling them into the deck.

Inland Traders isn't compatible with High Tide since the ships essentially replace that ability.

On the left is a card from the base game, on the right is Escape Room from the expansion. 
There's no graphical indication that Escape Room is an expansion card.

Final Thoughts:
Overall, I really enjoyed the new elements that the High Tide expansion adds to Harbour.  I've played with both players that have the base game and new players and everyone enjoyed it.  It didn't add too much additional complexity to the rules and played just as fast as the base game.

High Tide adds just enough to Harbour to add some refreshing gameplay.  

I found that the whole thing fits in the original box of you  out all of the cards in the tuck box.  I have the Kickstarter version, so I think I have a lot more characters than the retail version (not sure though), and my box doesn't sit flush.  The tuck box lifts the lid about 1/8 inch, but it's serviceable.

Plenty of room for everything in the base box!

With the tuck box for the expansion holding all the cards neatly the box almost closes, but it's close enough!

The issue with the expansion not being compatible with the inland traders variant isn't a problem for me.  I enjoyed High Tide enough that I don't think I'll play without it and I never actually played with the inland traders, so I'm not missing it.  I'm super happy to have a revived Harbour and think this is a must have expansion for anyone who loves the game and wants a reason to get it to the table again.  If you are a fan of Harbour, then you'll definitely enjoy High Tide.  Call your FLGS and have them order you a copy today.  It's definitely worth the $10.

There's not much here, but it's definitely a worthwhile purchase if you enjoy Harbour.

Quick Rating: 8/10

Rating Scale

Did you like this review?  Show your support: Support me on Patreon!Also, click the heart at Board Game Links , like GJJ Games on Facebook , or follow on Twitter .  And be sure to check out my games on  Tabletop Generation.

GJJG Game Reviews are independent, unpaid reviews of games I, George Jaros, have played with my family and friends. Some of these games I own, some are owned by friends, some are borrowed, and some are print and play versions of games. Where applicable I will indicate if games have been played with kids or adults or a mix (Family Play). I won't go into extensive detail about how to play the game (there are plenty of other sources for that information and I'll occasionally link to those other sources), but I will give my impressions of the game and how my friends and family reacted to the game. Quick Reviews will only get a single rating of 1-10 (low-high) based on my first impressions of the game during my first few times playing. Hopefully I'll get more chances to play the game and will be able to give it a full review soon.

If We Don't Save History, No One Will

The only surviving recordings of long dead indigenous tribes. Numerous Egyptian mummies, including an unopened coffin. Frescoes that survived the eruption of Vesuvius. Artifacts from the Nazca and Inca cultures, including a 3,500 year old Chilean man. An impeccable fossil record that boasted of 110 million year turtles, the nation's largest sauropods, and its most unique carnivores. The biological collections of hundreds of diverse insects and birds. An invaulable record of our global heritage, the fruits of 200 years of labor, were in one night baked, burned, and broiled. Brazil's independence day, for many, came not with cheers, but with weeping.



Brazil is far from the only place where history is threatened or destroyed. The Taj Mahal is now so discolored and degraded by air pollution that an Indian Supreme Court has suggested either shutdown or demolition. The Notre Dame de Paris is falling apart and is in need of a $114 million restoration, which currently relies on foreign donations. 2,000 kilometers of the Great Wall of China have disappeared since the Ming Dynasty, with only 8.2% of it in good condition according to a 2014 study. The Colosseum is routinely vandalized by tourists. In 2014, the beard on Tutenkhamen's mask snapped off during cleaning and was crudely glued back on, but thankfully repaired with beeswax by professionals in 2015. Consider too our natural history. The Great Barrier Reef is being bleached into ruin by rising ocean temperatures. Everest, our highest peak, is accumulating trash and human waste. Severe droughts influenced by climate change are degrading the Amazon rainforest. Floating islands of garbage are filling our oceans and farm pollution has produced an oxygen-lacking dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Will Venice, New Orleans, or the Maldives still be above land when the seas rise? How much access to their history and culture will be lost as a result?

This century alone has seen incalculable loss to the greatest treasures of history. In 2007, IKEA destroyed ten ancient tombs dating back 1,800 years to make room for construction in China's Nanjing province. Greenpeace lost much of its credibility as a conservationist movement in 2015 when its activists illegally crossed into the Nazca Lines and permanently damaged the soil. In 2013, a 2,300 year old Mayan pyramid was bulldozed so its limestone could make new roads. That same year, a 5,000 year old pyramid was bulldozed by construction companies in Peru. In 2014, a 5,000 year old rock painting in Quesada, Spain was destroyed by thieves who tried to steal it. ISIS, ravaged the glory of the Middle East in Mosul by destroying statues that date to Assyrian and Akkadian eras, blew up the tomb of Jonah, and brought ruin to Syria's historic Palmyra. Meanwhile our "ally", Saudi Arabia, continued its rape and pillage of Islamic heritage in Mecca by building a garish clocktower over a historic Ottoman fortress. Never mind the botched art "restorations": The Roman mosaics in Turkey, a 500 year old St. George statue in Spain, and new concrete was slapped onto the Spanish medieval castle of Matrera. On and on and on it goes, where it stops, nobody knows.

We lament the burning of Alexandria's library by Ceasar's army, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols, the smashing of Qurayshi idols by Muhammad, Napoleon's army using the Sphinx for target practice, Heinrich Schliemann's careless erasure of Troy, the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople and melted bronze Roman statues into coins, the carzed hammer attack on Michelangelo's Pieta, the Taliban's literal "defacing" of Buddhist statues, Saddam Hussein's crude makeover of ancient Babylon, and the current idiot-in-chief's demolition of priceless Art Deco sculptures to save money on phallic tower, but we are not far from the mistakes of history, and history has all too often repeated itself.

We are grateful to the Irish monks and Muslim scholars who kept the wisdom of the Greco-Roman Ancients alive, to First Lady Dolley Madison for rescuing Stuart's portrait of Washington from the White House fire, to Secretary of War Henry Stimson for knocking Kyoto off the firebombing list during the Pacific War, to the Malians of Timbuktu who saved their ancient manuscripts from the Turaeg rebels, and many others, but such heroes are few and far between. History always has so very few heroes.

The greatest threats to history are war, greed, dictatorship, vandalism, and negligence. The latter was what struck Brazil's museum. Brazilians have complained of austerity measures that cut funding to the musuem's upkeep. A situation so terrible that the museum did not have fire sprinklers, that even my college apartment has, nor were firefighters able to access hydrants to put the fires out. Brazil could apparently afford to host the World Cup in 2014, the Summer Olympics in 2016, but not to install fire sprinklers in its national museum. This is what happens when profit is put over people. If our history isn't even safe in musuems, among the curators, then it isn't safe anywhere. We must redouble our efforts, all of us, as global citizens, so that access to the treasures of our heritage, the lineage of our ancestors, the very stuff that makes us human, is never again erased from the modern memory. Even here, there is hope. After the tomb of Jonah was destroyed, archaeologists discovered an Assyrian palace not seen since 7th century BC. There's a lesson in that, perhaps.

A Tale Of Two Publishers (Tradecraft)

When I was building my Jeep, I was pricing bumpers when I noticed some companies, like Smittybilt were priced all over the map. Buying anything from that company made me feel bad. I always felt there was a better deal somewhere out there I wasn't aware of. Their products were middle of the road, with some very good and some very bad. I would buy things from them, use them for a while, and quietly take them off. Their reputation was ... mixed. Their shotgun approach to sales and quality are infamous.

Meanwhile there was AEV, American Expedition Vehicles, a high end company started by Jeep engineers that sold a narrow range of products, all highly engineered, and never more than a dollar or two difference between suppliers. One customer complained in an online review about how retailer prices were so similar. A retailer explained if they were to sell AEV products for a dollar less than their agreement, AEV would cut them off. So at the most competitive level, all product was sold at nearly an identical price. That's the difference between no brand value protection and brand value protection.

The advantage to the retailer is clear. If I'm selling a bumper, I would rather sell the premium product for $1,400 rather than the squirrelly discount product for $700, or $600 or whatever the market will bear that day. The manufacturer of the high end product is partnering with me. The higher priced manufacturer is maintaining value in their supply chain, maintaining a strong reputation, and thus selling to a well heeled clientele rather than a bunch of mud boggers looking for the lowest price. They make more money, which allows them to engineer quality, and the cycle continues. As a retailer I can decide what products to sell based on where I place my store in the marketplace. I can build a high end store and sell high end products at higher prices or I can sell everything, good or bad, and be the Smittybilt of retailers.*

Wizards of the Coast just dropped their MSRP on all their products going forward. If there is no price, there is no need for price protection. Ironically, this is exactly what I've called for many times in this blog, yet I'm disappointed and a little worried. What I was hoping for was possibly a bit utopian. I want to run a retail environment where price is inviolate and off the table, where I can focus on customer service, and events, all the various joy producing activities with the assumption customers will judge me based on my joy production, rather than my prices.

I would rather sell packs of stuff at a price than a shiny piece of card stock of subjective quality at a constantly fluctuating price. Yet the ability to sell the packs has fallen while the sales of the variable shiny has risen. It requires expertise and a fiddly system to sell variable shiny while it's much easier to sell new packs at a set price through my retail operation. And because it's so much easier, absolutely everyone can do it and I'm losing that battle. One reason stores close we don't discuss is they can't run the kind of store they want, and this is one example. They want it one way, but it's the other.

Asmodee has brand value protection as does Games Workshop. They're still competitors with retailers, but there are price floors that help me sell their goods. My initial reaction is to shun Wizards of the Coast and embrace Asmodee and Games Workshop as best I can. Their strategies are retailer friendly, while Wizards of the Coast feels predatory, the game trade equivalent of the soy bean king, selling their products as commodities. I have heard the next step may be dropping pre releases, and that right there is an exit strategy for quite a few stores that aren't Magic centric. We run events to get the cool stuff. Butts in seats! If you're going to drop events, you've removed our golden handcuffs. Don't get me wrong, I like gold, but the disconnect between "go buy on Amazon, but play at your FLGS" really pisses me off. Watching it all burn has great appeal.

This is all overly dramatic. The reality is nothing will really change. The offroad store will happily sell me that $700 low end bumper or the $1,400 high end bumper and they'll happily agree with me when I mention the value of the low end product or the superior engineering of the high end product. There are few retailers who get to truly pick their market position. Likewise, I'm not going to shun Wizards of the Coast any more than I'm going to turn my game store into AsmodeeLand. I will serve up both to the best of my ability. I will do my best to attract the Asmodee customers but I won't turn away Magic money probably ever. Taking stands is for politicians and priests. I have no such requirements for ideological purity.**

In the end, there's a lot more going on than my own needs. These brand value protection schemes are delicate flowers. Hasbro just discovered this when they were sued for instituting brand value protection in Europe. The larger the company, the harder it will be to institute brand value protection policies, as they conflict not only with international law, but laws between states. There is also the problem of brand value protection schemes holding independent retailers to a higher standard than mass market retailers, which is inherently unfair, even if we do cause most of our own problems. It's no surprise the consensus at WOTC was to have a consistent message on pricing. Do what you want.



*This is the same argument I've made for industry wide net pricing, by the way.
**But if you gave me a bucket of money, I would diversify away from the game trade.

Download Tekken 6 Full Version For Pc

Download Tekken 6 Full Version For pc

Tekken 6 Full Review

Welcome to Tekken 6 is one of the best fighting game especially for fighting lovers that has been developed  and published by Bandai Namco Games.This game was released on 26th November 2007.

Screenshot

System Requirements of Tekken 6 For Windows PC

• Operating System: Windows XP/Vista/ Windows 7 ( 64 Bit )
• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 or later.
• Setup Size: 700 MB
• RAM: 1GB
• Hard Disk Space: 1GB