Getting Started With Brettspielwelt: Part 3

As a word of warning here, I’ve never actually used the Spielpartner function in BSW because it was added in after I joined. I already knew how to find games, so why would I worry about learning a new and admittedly scary looking tool? Well, it does do some things you can’t do in any other way, so it’s probably worth learning. I’m going to try to explore what it can do and explain it here. (It doesn’t help that the English help file on the website is half in German…)

Click the Spielpartner button in the menu to open up the window that should look like the screenshot above. In the upper right hand corner is a “Game Manager” button. Clicking this closes the Spielpartner and takes you to the manager. (They really have a lot of ways to get to the manager, eh?) Also of note, there are 4 tabs near the top of the window.

The leftmost one, “Player calls”, shows all the game yells that have been sent out recently. Remember how when you were starting a game you could type in a message and click ok to broadcast it? This is one of the places those messages go. Clicking on a message in this window warps you to that game room. The rectangles themselves seem to contain the same sort of info as the manager, only in a more compressed format. The message entered appears at the bottom of the rectangle. In the case of the screenshot above, the Settlers game at the top entered no message but sent a blank yell to get on this list. Tichu has the message “one more”. Pretty straightforward stuff. The only odd thing here, I think, is that the messages populate at the bottom and scroll upwards. At least I think that’s odd…

The second tab “Game rooms” is blank by default.

The third tab “Filter” allows you to populate the first and second tabs, but it seems to have limited use for the second tab as shown below:

I filtered it to show only San Juan and Puerto Rico, but the problem is the “Game rooms” tab only has room for 9 rectangles and has no scroll bar. So, while the filter is useful in showing me some of the rooms, it can’t show me more than 9. The filter has 3 different things you can filter by and a pretty basic AND/OR/NOT system so you can do some complicated things with it if you’re really versed in it. For example, you can filter by the city the table is in (means nothing to you now, but means a lot to some people) and you can also filter by sets of people you’ve set up. So, you could set the filter up to show people on your friends list for example, and then you’d see at a glance what all your friends were playing. Assuming they’re only playing in at most 9 different games, anyway…

It can certainly help with the “Player Calls” tab, especially when combined with the 4^th tab below. If you don’t care about Tichu, for example, you’ll really want to set your filter up to exclude it from the “Player calls” tab. Otherwise half your game yells will be for Tichu which will waste the limited space in the tool.

Best of all, you can save up to 9 different filters with the green boxes on the filter screen, so you can quickly see where your friends are, and who’s in your town, and then fall back to your no-Tichu filter.

The fourth tab “SpielList” is used to toggle what games you want to see the game yells for. At least, that’s what it says when you click the boxes, but that’s not exactly what it means. You see, one of the options on the filter tab is “BSW-Anderes – inSpielList” which basically lets you add a whole bunch of games at once to your filter. This definitely has some uses when combined with some of the other options.

Finally, down at the very bottom is a quick game yell window. Toggling the sound button gives you an audible clue when your game is ready to start, I think, which could be useful. Beyond that it seems like it just duplicates the functionality inside the game start tool.

Spielpartner is an intimidating looking tool that I can definitely see some uses for now. I don’t think you need to know how to use it to get by since the manager is pretty good but the “Player calls” tab has potential. Join us next time for a discussion of the “meta-game” of BSW.

Getting Started With Brettspielwelt: Part 2

One thing you'll notice if you spend some time in the BSW manager is there are a few games that launch all the time and a lot of games that rarely ever start up. If you want to play Dominion, Tichu, or San Juan you'll find an open game up almost all the time. For some of the longer or more complicated game you're going to be waiting around a while if you're just joining from the "players needed" section of the manager. You also have little to no control over the game options this way, so if you really wanted to play a game of Puerto Rico with the expansion buildings you're probably going to be out of luck waiting for someone else to start it up.

There are two solutions to this problem and both are solved the exact same way. Solution one is to just find an empty room and start your own game. Solution two is to find a room with a game you like in progress, go to the room and watch the game and ask to get in on the next game should one happen.

The screenshot below indicates where you need to click to get where you're going here. It's a little small, but you're looking for the phrase 'Alle Spiele'. Click that phrase and the menu will expand and show every game in this manager. (Many other games are in the archive manager, found by clicking the lobby button up at the top.)

Find the game you want in the big list (you may need to scroll a bit) and click on it. This will populate the manager with every table for that game in the world. The tables and colours here are the same as those in the previous post, with one new background: A game with a blue background is a game in progress. The screenshot below shows all the San Juan tables. Second from the top is a game in progress, every other table is one where you can start up your own game.

Assuming you're starting your own game, when you get in the following window will pop up. (You can click and drag the floating window and pull it outside the main BSW window to make it a floating window like I have here.) Most of this is pretty straightforward (click join to join, click an option to toggle it on or off) but there are a couple interesting parts.

The invisible option prevents the game from showing in the manager. You can use this if you're feeling antisocial and just want to play with people who are already in the room. Chances are you don't want to do this.

At the bottom is an edit box, you can type a message in here. When you click the OK button the system will broadcast your message to everyone who cares about the game you're in. It also makes the message appear in the manager.

So, basically, just go to an empty room, join the game, set a brief message, and hit ok. You should have opponents in a reasonable amount of time if there's any interest in the game you chose.

Next time I'll go into more details about what I meant when I said 'everyone who cares about the game'. (Preview: It uses the Spielpartner button!)

Getting Started With Brettspielwelt: Part 1

Brettspielwelt is an incredible gaming portal that has 78 multiplayer board games and a few single player ones available for play. It initially started up as a way for some German guys to play games with each other online and has evolved over the years into a great site. It’s entirely free to use and I actually mean that. A lot of game sites nowadays are ‘free’ but you can spend money to gain advantages. Not so here. I’m not aware of any way to spend money at all through the game client, and the only things for sale on the website are actual board games and accessories.

Unfortunately since it’s a hobby site and not a huge corporation trying to make a ton of money off of you the interface and setup is a little less than stellar. It’s easy to get started and playing games if you already know what you’re doing. It’s a lot murkier if you’re just starting out. So, my intention here is to write a small series on getting started to ease the transition and help people get going.

First off, you need to head to the community page and create an account. It’s possible you’ll be shown a page in German, if so click on the UK flag in the upper right hand corner to change the site language.

I already have an account so I’m not sure what sort of email related confirmation hoops you may have to jump through (let me know if it’s complex!) After you have an account you need to download the client, which you can do through the “Download online game client” link at the top of the same page. Download the exe, run it, click the image. The installer is in German, but is pretty straightforward. Pick a directory to install into, and click Installieren. Then click Fertig stellen when that finishes. (Appropriately, that seems to translate into Finish. Or into Viimeistely in Finnish!)

There’s no customization here, it just creates a program in your start menu. Find Brettspielwelt there and click on the Brettspielwelt program. This will launch the launcher which should say ‘Click on picture to start…’ Maybe if your client things you’re German it will say something else. Regardless, click the picture. This will start a fairly short patching process. This is a onetime issue, afterwards it will only need to patch when they put out a big update. A log-in screen should pop up, go ahead and log in.

By default (on my computer at least) the window is too small to display the whole menu. Click and drag the borders to make the window bigger so you can see more stuff. You may be tempted to just maximize the window but trust me when I say this can be a mistake. (The client auto-sizes different aspects of games depending on your window dimensions, and I’ve found the chat box can get unreasonably big or small depending on my resolution.)

After you’re logged in you should see something like the screenshot above. You’ll note my menu by default is a rather eclectic mix of German and English. You can build your own menu in a property file which I will do by the time this series is completed and upload it. For now, though, we’re just trying to get into a game. By default you load into what they call the ‘Manager’. (You can always get back to this screen by typing in /manager, or by clicking the Lobby button in the menu, or by clicking Menu->MultiUserSpiele->Manager.) Clicking the Lobby button a second time will take you to the archive manager, which is the same thing but with older games.

The manager has a few parts. Way down at the bottom is the chat window for the room. Don’t expect a lot of intelligent chat in the main manager, but you can probably find someone willing to help if you ask a question there. Just above the chat window and on the right is a cube with a question mark and a set of gears. Hover over the question mark to get a brief summary of some of the buttons on the screen. Click the gear to get a window filtering the games being shown in the middle. The default is to only have ‘Learning Game’, ‘Novices Welcome’, and ‘Social Game’ turned on and the ‘Fast Game’ and ‘Expert Game’ turned off. This is exactly how you want it to start, so don’t fiddle with it. On the upper left are filters that allow you to filter by game genre or game title. Useful if you have a specific game in mind, but for now we just want to find something and the default is to show every game that hasn’t started and has people.

In the middle is a listing of those active games. Each rectangle represents a game table where the game is set up but hasn’t started yet. On the left is a picture of the game box. Then in text it will give you the game name, any game options in brackets, and then a listing of the people in the game. Below that text is a box indicating experience type. (Here the N is for new players and the question marks mean no type selected.) After that is a code indicating where the table is located in the game world (you can completely ignore this for now) followed by the name of the table. (Chances are better that your opponents will speak English if this name is in English, but it’s not a guarantee.) After that is potentially another list of players. These players are standing around the table watching but have not sat down to play. Finally, the background of the game indicates if you can sit down from the manager or if you have to stand at the table and ask to join or not. Green means you’re good to go. Brown means you need to go ask.

For example, the top game on the list is for a game of Dominion. The only option the host turned on for that game is randomset:SeaIntrigue which I believe means the cards used in the game will be randomly pulled from the core game, the Seaside expansion, and the Intrigue expansion. There are 3 people currently sitting down to play the game: ridic, Chalkbot, and plushbandit. All are male, if that matters to you. The game has no experience setting, is named Domcartes, and has no watchers. The background is brown so you can’t sit down to play, you need to pop in and ask if you can join. (This tends to be the polite thing to do anyway.)

The next game is a game of Settlers of Catan. This game has the options drawseat, host, and TURNIER turned on. Drawseat means the seating order is scrambled before the game starts. Host means that only the first person who sat down can change the options. (Those two options tend to be possible on all games.) TURNIER is a Settlers specific option and means you start the game with a settlement, a city, and 3 roads instead of 2 settlements and 2 roads. This game has two people currently sitting down, and you can join it right from the manager if you want by double clicking on it.

The 5th game on the list has a circle as the gender of the watcher. This means that person is actually a bot, likely there to parse the log for interesting stats of some kind.

Now, let's say there’s a game on the list we want to play. Right click on the game box to get a nice info bar down at the bottom describing a lot of what I just described along with two flashing buttons: Join Game and Enter Room. (Join Game only exists on green backgrounds.) In this case I clicked on the San Juan game 5th from the top, and then on Enter Room. When you’re first getting started you should always click on Enter Room first for one main reason: the game files aren’t on your computer yet. The art and sounds that make up the game need to get downloaded the first time you look at the game. Depending on the complexity of the game you can expect to stare at a blank screen for a fair chunk of time the first time you enter a game’s room. You can still read the chat in the room, but you’ll need to wait for the files to download before you can actually play the game.

While the art for San Juan was loading (and while I was taking the screenshot) the user Sporran asked me to join the game. San Juan doesn’t have much to download so I didn’t have to wait long, if it was a longer wait I’d have told him I was loading to explain why I wasn’t joining. You can also notice the game control console which popped up when I joined the table. This window is where you can choose the different options for the game to appear in the manager. It’s also how you join the games (though you can type /join to join as well) and how games are started (or /start). I clicked join, Sporran started the game, and away we went.

Individual games have vastly different methods of controlling the game. The main website tries to explain the interface for the individual games with varying levels of success. Generally speaking just ask your opponent how to do something if you can’t figure it out and they’ll try to help as best they can. A lot is intuitive (click the prospector button to call prospector) but some is very unintuitive (hover over the very corner of someone’s play mat to see how many cards they have in their hand). If there’s a specific game anyone wants to know the interface for let me know and I’ll try to explain it. (Or you could just go ahead and try it! As long as you’re not in an Expert Only game no one will really mind.)

As you can see, Sporran destroyed me in this game. Look at that board! (He’s the upper left one, with all the good buildings. I’m the right one with just a ZUMFT HALL and nothing else. (Guild Hall))

With that you should be good to at least get started with playing on Brettspielwelt. Tomorrow should see a post regarding starting your own games instead of just joining one that’s up and looking for players.

Brettspielwelt

I took the night off raiding today so I could play on BSW and go to sleep early, and am I ever glad I did. That this is true speaks volumes about my will to raid right now, I think, though that could just be because I've been sick all week and sleep is the thing to do when you're sick.

At any rate, it turns out Notre Dame is on BSW. It's one of the games I played at WBC last year, the one with the drafting component to it. I played like 9 games tonight and had a blast playing it. I'm getting a decent grasp of at least one strategy, anyway, though it seems like there's probably better ones out there. At least I'm not getting destroyed by the plague very often!