Finnish Board Game Society Brettspielwelt Guide
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Finnish Board Game Society BrettspielWelt guide Finnish Board Game Society BSW Guide 2/16 1. Introduction BrettspielWelt (Boardgameworld in English) is a German board game website/game server in the Internet. The address of BrettspielWelt is www.brettspielwelt.de. You can switch the language into English on the front page but when you play you often meet German players and see German dis- cussion. Don’t be discouraged by this, it’s in fact very easy to get along with board gamers from other countries J. BrettspielWelt is a very important service to any board gamer because: • It’s easy to register and you can play for free • BSW offers THE best selection of well-known board games in a network playable format. • You can find co-players at all times in BSW. • Within BSW there is a very active community for board gamers (around medieval city theme) that offers new friends and help & company for playing. The user interface of BrettspielWelt might seem confusing in the beginning but with very little practice and by reading this guide you will be playing with ease soon. In addition to this text you can find more English documentation and instructions from the www.brettspielwelt.de website and from Boomer’s website www.brettspielwelt.info. The reason to learn using BSW? It can be found here. Check this list of board games! http://www.brettspielwelt.de/Spiele/?nation=en. 2. How to register Before gaming it makes sense to register into BrettspielWelt server. You can try gaming with unre- gistered nickname and password but registering is worthwhile because: • Registering doesn’t cost anything and requires very little personal information about you • It’s easy to register and you can tweak information people see about you when you play • All games you play will be registered to you nickname and with the points you will go up in player levels and get more commands you can use in BSW. • Playing with a shared network connection (computers use so called private IP addresses / NAT) does not work without registered user accounts. Start the registration from this address http://www.brettspielwelt.de. Click the flag to switch the pages to English. In this document it is assumed that you use English. Note! If necessary you can always switch pages to English by adding /?nation=en to the end of any BSW web link. Markku Jaatinen (JoeLamer) 2007 version 1.0 Finnish Board Game Society BSW Guide 3/16 Start the actual registration by clicking the Register button on the first page. Because you do not have a username and pass- word yet, press Noch kein Brettspielwelt-Mitglied? link in the bottom of the window (Not a Member of BrettspielWelt?) Registration page from the BSW’s Community section opens. The information on the page is man- datory. Select your gender and after that type in the nickname you want to use in BrettspielWelt. Type a suitable password 2 times. Put a working e-mail address to E-mail field. E-mail is used to send the activation code to you. After that e-mail is needed very seldom and you can always choose whether to show it to other or not. Next is your date of birth and your country. If you don’t find your country on the list select Other (Sonstiges). After registration you will get a message saying that registration was successful and you’ll also re- ceive an e-mail titled “Brettspielwelt-Registrierung”. Click the web link in that message and your BSW account will activated, you will be logged in to the BSW web site and BSW help page is shown. If you want to modify your data or change the information other play- ers see about you click Profile in the BSW web site. If something went wrong in the user registration you can delete your account by clicking Delete Name. You can add your location and contact de- tails to the your profile. Additionally there are settings for the language used when game is started from the website or when you look at BSW web pages. The last part in the profile shows messages that are displayed when you log and out of BSW and teleport in or out from the game room. Description is shown to every gamer that checks your information when you are online. You can check the information for example using /info command. Markku Jaatinen (JoeLamer) 2007 version 1.0 Finnish Board Game Society BSW Guide 4/16 3. How to use BrettspielWelt You need a computer and a working Internet connection to play in BrettspielWelt. Playing happens using your browser or a separate BrettspielWelt client program (BSW players talk simply about client). All games in BSW are programmed using Java language so you need to have Java support installed on your computer. If necessary, you can install Java from this address (www.java.com) using Download link. You don’t need a specific operating system or a browser so long as Java sup- port is installed and works properly. In this example we will play using a browser interface. You can find more infor- mation about the separate BSW client from chapter 9. Playing starts by choosing the right language and pressing Play button on the front page of www.brettspielwelt.de. Your browser starts the Java support and retrieves the gaming interface. In the meanwhile it asks our username and password. Type your username into Name field and your password to Password field. Sound on/off lets you choose whether you hear the sound effects from the games or not. Typi- cally it makes sense to keep the sound on so that you no- tice the changes in taking turns not only by seeing but also by sound. Note! On the first time it takes longer to start the playing system because you computer loads game components from the server. If you experience any problems in starting the client (e.g. you don’t see graphics) restart you browser and try again. When you log in the first thing you’ll see is the BrettspielWelt game window in English and within it Game Manager (Spiele Manager) which is used to start new games. BrettspielWelt is organized around the theme of medieval cities and player communities form their own towns. There are houses in the towns and within those houses the rooms where all games in BSW run. There is no need to know more about the town theme if you want to just play board games. The majority of players in BSW play board games without belonging to any specific town. If you are interested more about the communities and towns, check chapter 10. Markku Jaatinen (JoeLamer) 2007 version 1.0 Finnish Board Game Society BSW Guide 5/16 Toolbar Games starting up Message area Command line On the top of the game window is a toolbar that gives a shortcut to the most used game commands. On the bottom of the windows is a grey message area that shows messages from system and other users. In the very bottom of the window is a command line for typing in messages to other users and giving BSW game commands that start with /. The /manager command in the example would move you to the Game Manager window. There’s more information about game commands in Ap- pendix 1. You can adjust the size of the game window on your screen but it is a good idea to maintain the proportions of the window so that you see at least a couple lines of the messages in message area. In the top of the gaming window is a toolbar that offers you shortcuts to some of the BSW com- mands. The rest of the commands are typed in using the command line. News Shows news from BSW administrators and guilds. Game From Game you can join into games, start a game and reset a game. If the game offers options or expansions these can typically be activated from the game menu too. Note! If you press the downward arrow next to Game button you get quick list of all game commands. Markku Jaatinen (JoeLamer) 2007 version 1.0 Finnish Board Game Society BSW Guide 6/16 You can close the Game window by pressing the red button in the right top corner of the window. You can give all these commands from the command line too if you like (/join, /start, /reset, /option xx). GamePartner Shows the invitations to starting games and link to Game Manager you can use to choose the game you would like to play. Info Shows information about the gamers in the same room. You can use com- mand /info from the command line to check player info too. Room Show the players that are currently in this room. Channel Shows the chat channels of BSW. Help Opens help window. Display Changes display size to given resolutions. Note! You can change what commands are displayed by clicking right mouse button on toolbar and choosing Configure from the popup menu. After login you may see chat windows opening to your screen. The main chat #SPV show discussion ga- mers are having and invita- tions to come to play with them. In this window re- placement players are in- vited to play Settlers of Catan (Siedler) and some- body is looking for a part- ner to a Tichu game. At this point you can move this window so that it does not disturb you learning. New BSW players will also automatically see Newbie help that assists you in gaming.