I decided to take on one of my favorite games and one of the most-requested games, Puerto Rico. I've been nervous about doing this one as it's hard to teach, but I figured I'd give it a shot.



You can enjoy this episode over at

http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/?p=80

(New)
You can also watch it right here through Vimeo:



(p.s. Do you like the Vimeo version?)

(p.p.s. The artifacts in there are from my old video camera not being too happy; I have yet to find my new one and am suspecting the worst... which is deflating.)

I never thought I'd see this being taught in a video. Even though I don't really like the game, it's nice to see such a cool contribution.

This needed to be done and I am glad you found the time to do it right. Thanks!

Thanks Scott! I'm really glad you got a chance to make a video of Puerto Rico. I have some friends who I'd like to give the game to, and I'll be sure to point them to your video first.

Thank you Scott for the great video! I really enjoyed it. However, I have a comment on explaining the captain phase. As far as I understand the rules, when you have empty ships available and you want to ship, you cannot choose a ship, you must put your goods in the biggest ship available.
csaba

From page 6 of the Puerto Rico rulebook:


The key rule is the 2nd half of the second-to-last bullet:



Therefore, if a player had to ship 11 barrels of corn with three empty ships, then that player would have to place his/her corn barrels on the largest capacity ship. If, however, that same player only had to ship 2 barrels of corn (again, with three empty ships to choose from), then he/she could choose any of the empty ships.

Does this make sense?

I see your point. So if the goods do not fill the ship completely, then one can choose any of the available ships. Actually I like this way better, it makes shipping even more complicated. We even played it that way until I "discovered" that we did it "wrong", I guess we go back to the old way.


Thanks for the clarification.

csaba

Thanks for your efforts with this video, Scott! Well done.

Thank you! I'm the local 'gamer guy' in the neighborhood and am frequently showing new games to my friends. PR has been a particular challenge because I was unsure if I understood the game mechanics correctly. After seeing this video and seeing how the game operates I have a lot more confidence about playing it among a group of newbies (including myself).

thanks scott!

i love PR and its great to go back to the basics to see have a deeper look at how i play it myself.

i would also be interested in seeing a shorter extra video to build on this one, specifically looking at the PR expansion with the extra building, forrests, rules, and how that meshes with the origional. i have the expansion, but dont get enough play time with it because my freinds dont understand how it goes with the game so well... they just like the origional!
being able to point them to such an authoritative source would certainly solve some of my problems

thanks again

Scott, I've enjoyed watching your videos, but I've been wondering about those little changes in audio quality. I take it you have had to record some bits afterwards, but I am a bit puzzled about why this causes such a significant change in audio quality. It's a small thing, but should be easy to correct. The problem with the audio quality should disappear if you just did your dubbing with the same equipment you recorded the original audio with and do it in the same room you originally shot your video.

As for those artefacts in your video are quite easy to remove, because at least most of them appear over the background which doesn't move and the lighting stays the same. Not sure what what you edit your videos with, so I'm not sure if it's possible to fix them with the editing software, but at least if you've got some effects software, it would be fairly easy to remove those artefacts. And if you don't have an effects software, it's not too difficult to remove them frame by frame by using something like photoshop. It's fairly easy that way as well, just a little more work if you have to "paint them out" frame by frame.

Maybe you already are aware of all of this and don't have the time and/or energy to "fix it in the post", but all I'm saying is that with a bit of extra effort, you could turn a good thing into something excellent.

And thanks for the videos you've done so far. Especially the Mah-Jong video was very useful when me and my friends played it for the first time.

Me too, actually. I do use the same equipment, yet the things I re-record later never sound the same. I try using the equalizer tool to fix it, but I don't have the audio engineering skills to make this work out.

The sounds I record when I've been talking for 30 minutes are different than the sounds I record when I'm doing 10 seconds, even in the same space with the same equipment. This is my due to lack of skill and training as a voice artist. A good audio engineer could fix this using the tools built-in to the video editing tool, but to me, it's just a bunch of sliders. But, when I mess with the sliders, add in reverb, etc. to try and make my voice match, it adds in new noises.




Part of this is the fact that I'm not using professional-level tools, part of this is my lack of experience as a video engineer. I find it very difficult to try and edit minute things like this in the video, and the time it would take to go through, frame-by-frame, and clean this out frightens me.


With any editing project, you hit a point where you have decide if the time it takes to fix things is worth the effort. You can do editing forever continually fixing things, and it seems like it takes that long.

I probably spent 30 hours editing this episode, between all of the cuts, manually splicing in audio, etc., etc.

The other thing to consider is that this is being mushed and squished for Web distribution, so trying to work at a very fine level just isn't worth it, as the compression is going to ruin things anyway and add new artifacts. If it were going to DVD or TV, that would one thing, but when most people are going to watch it streamed in a small window with compressed audio, there's a point where it doesn't really matter much.


To take this show beyond what it is, I would need a revenue stream. The reality of that is that as much as people appreciate it, most wouldn't pay for it. (I found that out when I did spend an incredibly long time making high-quality videos for a DVD and couldn't even sell 20 of them to the community - http://www.createspace.com/Store/ShowEStore.jsp?rtnPt=0&id=2... has the videos.)


How much would users be willing to pay to view an episode? Very little to nothing, I would predict. I would guess that it would generate more bad will than profit if I put a charge on an episode. I do appreciate the donations I've gotten over the years, but in total, they probably come up to less than $1500.



Would it be worth it for this final 10% boost in quality if I put in 3 minutes of commercials of gaming products throughout the show? I don't think so; commercials would annoy everyone, and the minor flaws that I have don't bother everyone. This specialty boardgame industry is a poor industry. The amount I could make from commercials would certainly not be enough to cover someone's time that it would take to take the videos to the next level. If I went outside the industry with AOL and Pepsi-Cola ads, that would annoy people much more than some quality issues.


I'm burning out on doing the shows, to be honest. I'm trying to put out one a month, but am even finding that difficult. Having my new camera lost/stolen in the move really poured a buck of cold water on my fire, as it means I'm back to manually dubbing sound with video. My passion for them has waned; I had no inspiration for a funny intro for this episode, for example.


Also, since I started these over 2 years ago, I've now become a department chair at a University for one of the top-ranked programs in Library and Information Science in the US and also am the head of a Gaming Lab in the department (http://gamelab.syr.edu). While I'm spending more and more time looking at gaming, I'm doing so as a researcher and as a gaming advocate to the library community. The impact I can have on the hobby through libraries is far greater than anything I could do with these videos; if I can help libraries to see games beyond Chess, DDR, and Guitar Hero, they will then expose thousands of users to the variety of game types out there. (From 2006 alone, I've documented over 30,000 users that participated in gaming in libraries, and that's only from the librarians who responded to a survey!)


In my future plans, I'm going to be doing fewer of the heavy games and more of the games that would be appropriate to run as a service in libraries. That's why I finally stepped back and planned out Puerto Rico, as that has been one that I wanted to do for a while, but knew that if I shift my focus, PR would be too complex. This way, my shows can serve my research focus as well as my hobby.



So, what's the point of all of this? Where one chapter ends, a new one begins - The door is open for you!


It's time for people out there with fresh enthusiasm, good editing skills, and the time and passion to join in the need to create good educational videos for board games. There are a few other board game video creators out there like http://bookshelfgames.com/ and http://obsessedwithgaming.com/ and there's certainly room for more.

Are you sure it's about your lack of skill as a voice artist? I mean, to me it sounds like the short takes you've recorded have been recorded at a lower volume compared to the long takes and then you've had to raise the volume of the footage with the audio tools of your editing software. Not sure if this is the case, but that's the impression I get just by listening to the audio.

I'm sure you've thought of all the possibilites, but just for fun and the distant possibility that I might be able to help you in some way to solve your problem, I'm trying to think of what could be wrong with the audio so I'm just asking some things that come to my mind. Or are you interested in fixing the problem? I mean, you say you're burned out doing the videos, so feel free to tell me to mind my own business.

It's just I'm interested in these kind of things and love trying to solve problems. If you're not interested, just tell me and pay no mind to my questions.

But in case you're interested, here's a few questions:

What kind of equipment do you use? Do you have an external microphone attached to your camera, do you use the camera's own microphone? As you say that you're not using professional equipment, I take it you don't use some external audio recorder like a DAT(?)

Are you always at the same distance from the microphone when speaking?

Do you always check and adjust the level of incoming volume, so that you're always recording it as loud as it's technically possible without messing up the sound...(?)

When re-recording voice overs, do you record just the lines you need?



I totally agree with you. You could spend an eternity tweaking little details(there are always little things you can improve on), but is it going to make the film/video better? It might, but is it worth the effort? Sometimes it is, but surprisingly often it's not. Sometimes you can get obsessed with trying to fix some small glitch and in your mind it becomes a much bigger thing than it actually is. Surprisingly often the viewer wouldn't even