Posts filed under 'Review'
Another game I picked up during my vacation in Vermont was the Catan Card Game (Amazon
, Board Game Geek). My wife and I hoped it would give us the feel of the Settlers Of Catan Board Game
for two players.
We already have Starship Catan
, a two-player board game that uses a modified version of the resource mechanics from the original board game to fuel a space-exploration themed game. It’s great fun actually physically upgrading your ship with laser guns, engines, and probes, but it takes a while to set up.
I hoped the card game might make for quicker setup, hoped it would stay true to the original setting, and if nothing else give us an interesting taste of how a board game could be reinterpreted as a card game.
I’m happy to say that the Catan Card Game is a grand hit, at least with us. Setup isn’t instant, since the game comprises about six or seven different (small) decks, but once both players understand the rules, it plays fast and fun!
I have to admit, I have so far lost every single game to my wife. (Basically, she absolutely PWNs my ass in competitive tabletop games.) That hasn’t detracted from the fun of the play.
In the card game, each player is given a set of nine starting cards with which to build his or her “principality.” One of the nine cards is the player’s initial settlement, two are roads, and the remaining six are resource nodes, each displaying a single die. As in Starship Catan, resource accumulation is tracked by turning the resource node cards so the number of resources “stored” on that card (o, 1, 2, or 3) is placed at the bottom. A single card can’t ever hold more than three of its resources.
Players spend these resources to build roads (to separate settlements), new settlements (adding two new resource nodes for each settlmenet built), and buildings, as well as to upgrade settlement to cities (which can accomodate four buildings instead of two). Each of these is represented by a card, and as new places are built, the player’s principality grows—horizontally for new settlements, vertically for new buildings.
Although you can always build a road, settlement, or city if you can afford it (and cards of the appropriate sort remain), in order to construct a building, you have to draw it from one of the four decks of face-down cards. Also in these decks are action cards that let you bend the basic mechanics (by destroying your opponent’s buildings, for example, or defending against certain threats). The buildings themselves add victory points, increase resource production, defend against threats, and grant their owners other benefits.
Finally, the game is affected by “events.” When the resource die is rolled, an event die is also rolled. It may indicate an attack of raiders (who steal resources), a free resource to both players, or a draw from the final deck of the game, the “event cards.” These cards are almost always interesting and occasionally catastrophic.
Players may also field armies of knights (the mechanics of armies depend mostly on comparing each player’s knights’ total “strength”).
The game has ample complexity, with lots of room for entertaining emergent situations and challenges, but play itself is just plain fun. Strategy from game to game varies depending on the cards you happen to draw—and, of course, the luck of resource production.
I’m also pleased to say that the game keeps players moving along at a reasonably even pace. Oh, yes, my wife beat me every time, but never by so much that I ever gave up any hope of catching up (except maybe in the last turn or two). Unlike with the dreaded Monopoly, the game never devolved to an agonizing and unending pillaging by one player of another. Every turn, each player had some hope of advancing.
We’ve since acquired (but have not tired) the Catan Card Game Expansion Set
. It basically contains six different expansions that can be added to the game, giving each play a very different feel. I also noted from a quick scan of the rulebook that it supports a sort of tournament play where players can build their own decks. I’m unlikely to ever give that a serious try, but adding dragons or barbarians to the game seems just plain fun, and I can’t wait to give it a try.
September 20th, 2007
I got back from vacation less than a month ago, but I already miss it. I worked almost full time while on vacation, so it’s not the work I have to do now that bothers me; it’s the structure. In Vermont, effective “working from home,” I found time to do work whenever it didn’t interfere with my family life. Now, back in the office, I squeeze family and fun time in when it doesn’t interfere with the expected nine-to-five (or in my case seven-to-three) work schedule my company imposes on me.
One thing that’s missing is the casual gaming my wife and I—and other friends—did while we were in Vermont.
And one game that we’re not playing now is the Illuminati
card game (the deluxe edition, whatever that means) from Steve Jackson Games. I picked it up in Heroes Kingdom in St. Alban’s, VT, because I’ve enjoyed many an SJG product, because the theme (illuminated conspiracy) is great fun, and because the box promised the game would work for “2–6 players.”
Apart from not really working for two players, I have to say it’s a good game. But I’ll start with my quibble.
The box advertises a game for two to six players, but on the first page of the rules it warns that it’s best not to play with less than four. Three is marginal, at two you’re definitely missing something, and both are “not recommended” according to the rules. My wife and I found this to be completely true. I understand why they printed the box the way they did, but since one primary reason for our purchase was that the game was suitable for two players, I’m a bit miffed.
That said, we quite enjoyed the game. My wife beat my soundly four games out of four, we laughed at the cards and enjoyed the different feel the game has when you play different factions.
In fact, I think it’s the factions that really make the game. Depending on your randomly chosen faction, you have very different strengths and weaknesses, and each faction also has its own unique goal. (Except for the UFO faction, which gets to choose its goal from the list and keep that secret.) Thus, depending on your own faction and those of other players, each game is radically different—more different from game to game than Settlers of Catan I’d argue, despite the fact that Catan’s board layout changes every game.
The different factions wind up adding quite a bit of complexity to what is, what it starts, a fairly straightforward game to play. The turns go fast. But depending on your own goals, strengths, and strategy—and of course the happenstance of how the deck is shuffled—the convolution of a world fought over by illuminated conspiracy groups seems to unfold, with wit, on the table.
The rules suggest—and I’m convinced they’re right—that with four or five players the fun increases. One-on-one, the only goal is to win and frustrate your opponent. With more players, though, alliances can easily form (and of course just as easily break). Best of all, the game actively supports the possibility of multiple players winning simultaneously.
Alas, with just the two of us, we didn’t get to sample the real double-dealing and backstabbing of desperate alliances and bitter betrayal, but I hope to rope some gamer friends into a few games soon (maybe even this weekend), to see how it all plays out.
September 14th, 2007
No, I don’t know why Heroes Kingdom spells its name that way. That didn’t stop us from enjoying the store as a fun spot to visit on our vacation in Vermont. We stayed about half an hour away from St. Albans, and friends staying in a nearby cabin decided to visit the town one evening. They spotted the store, but because it was closed couldn’t investigate.
So we all went together a couple of days later.
Truth to tell, I haven’t spent much time in game stores, despite my passion for the hobby. Online prices always beat brick-and-mortar prices, and online information is good enough that it hasn’t seemed worth the time to me. But now, even though I won’t be back to St. Albans for a year, thanks to this store I have resolved to make time. We would up spending a total of about two hours there.
The RPG section leaves a lot to be desired. It sits on two smallish shelves and features about 95% D20 books. The board game section is small, too, but it had some good offerings. Descent
tempted me, but I resisted for now. My friend grabbed Zombies!!! 
I picked up both the board game–inspired Settlers of Catan Card Game and Deluxe Illuminati (which has nothing to do with board games).
The store focuses on collectible games. Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures
and DC HeroClix figures
(and many other collectible figure games) lined the shelves. Magic The Gathering
and other collectible card games were also well represented. My other friend managed to snag some booster packs of WizKid’s Pirates at Ocean’s Edge
, her passion and something she’s had trouble finding lately.
Other shelves were laden with action figures (which mean nothing to me) and Warhammer
materials.
Best of all, though, my two-year-old had a grand time. The back room, normally used for gaming, had a stash of pieces of various board games, including some oriented toward kids. She played with an odd collection of a bus, a dragon, and some other bits and pieces while we grownups looked around.
My daughter has already developed something of a dice fetish, so she and I spent some time looking at the broad display of colorful polyhedrons. After we left, I kept wishing I’d gone ahead and bought some of the unusual barrel dice they had for sale. As luck would have it, we justified a return trip a couple of days later, and I did snag a set. Since I mostly play GURPS, I don’t have a great justification for the purchase, but they’re fun, interesting, and different.
And they’re tempting me to go out and buy Serenity Role Playing Game (Serenity)
, partly because I love the setting, partly because I’d like to try the game, and partly because it will give me an excuse to bring out these funky fellows.
August 29th, 2007
It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m just catching up with my posting.
I have to admit, though, that one of the things that kept me busy over the weekend was Space Taxi 2, a worthy sequel to the original Commodore 64 action game that came out in 1984. In a fit of nostalgia for some of the games I remembered playing in my teens—games that don’t seem to fit neatly into a single category—I Googled Space Taxi and discovered that Twilight Games has made a shareware version available for download.
The Commodore 64 was a wonderful platform for innovative computer games in the 80s, and the original Space Taxi was a prime example of why. Sure, the graphics look horribly dated, now, but I remember being impressed that the passengers actually talked in the game.
More importantly, the gameplay was a pleasant challenge. You piloted a thruster-powered taxi, ferrying passengers from platform to platform while avoiding obstacles. Using thrusters, which accelerated you only gradually, made the game feel very different from just about anything else (except maybe Lunar Lander) in terms of control. I think the top speed of the car was limited by the size of the level (hitting the edge was fatal) rather than the power of the thrusters. Gravity behaved realistically, too. Stop giving occasional up-thrusts, and your cab would start to sink toward the bottom of the screen%mdash;or wherever the gravity source for a particular level was located.
The challenge wasn’t in being super-fast or mashing your joystick button. Sure, your fuel gradually depleted and you earned less money per trip if you took too long. But surviving without crashing and making deft, gentle landings made for a better chance of success than mindless speed.
I’ve just described Space Taxi in detail in a review about Space Taxi 2 because the latter is pretty much exactly the same game. The graphics are significantly updated, the physics feels a bit more realistic, and the possibility of mouse-based control has been added, but the gameplay, down to some exact mission layouts, is identical. When I started playing, even though it’s been twenty-three years since I last played, I knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
I have only one real complaint: you can’t see the whole level at a time. The screen scrolls as you fly toward the edge. I experimented with windowed and full-screen mode, and neither seemed to allow me to avoid this. On levels with lots of obstacles, it becomes almost impossible to negotiate some tricky paths without having failed them once before. Seems to me it would have been a simple matter to shrink everything down just a bit so the entire level could be viewable at once.
I asked my wife to give the game a try. She’s a gamer (now), but she’d never played or even heard of Space Taxi. She gave it one try—and we both had some good laughs watching her cab careen wildly about the screen as she got a feel for the controls—and then declared she’d had enough. Her number one complaint was that her fingers hurt from using the arrow keys (I asked her not to use the mouse so she’d have to use the landing gear, an added dimension to gameplay that’s eliminated in the mouse-based version). Perhaps if we’d used a real keyboard instead of the laptops, this wouldn’t have been a problem.
She, too, disliked being unable to see the entire level at once, and in the end decided that as it got more and more difficult, she’d find it less and less fun. I disagree; I think as she got a better feel for the cab she’d find that the game favors finesse. The game has thrills, but they’re the thrill of successful and diligent navigation, not near-impossible button mashing.
Twilight Games has a free and very enjoyable demo available for Windows (nothing native for Mac, I’m afraid). You have to shell out twenty bucks for the full version. Seems a bit pricey to me, but since this game (more a remake than a sequel) updates the game without ruining what made it fun, I may just be tempted.
July 30th, 2007
More than twenty years ago, Orson Scott Card published Ender’s Game, so why am I reviewing it now? Well, partly because, after twenty years, I suspect that some few newer fans of science fiction may actually not have encountered the book yet. But I have a better reason.
Ender’s Game is the best science-fiction novel focused on games and gaming that has ever been written.
The book isn’t just about games, which is part of why it succeeds. It recounts the experiences of Andrew Wiggin, who goes by “Ender.” Only six years old, he’s taken to a Battle School in orbit around Earth to train for an officer’s position in the International Fleet, the united interstellar army dedicated to defending humanity from the hostile insectoid aliens known as Buggers.
Games serve as a primary means of education in the book. Students spend their free time playing video games in a shared arcade or on their own “desks”—effectively, networked laptops. All the games, apparently, teach small lessons in strategy, tactics, and even more academic subjects. Card gives us just enough detail about the video games that we can imagine them as fun and innovative, even after twenty years of innovative game development have elapsed.
The book focuses especially on a zero-G battle simulation game that is the obsession of all the students. Divided into armies, the students vie with one another to achieve top rankings in various categories. Naturally, Ender performs exceptionally well.
But the game sounds damn fun. Card believably explores the physics of the game, imagining what would and would not work in such detail that you can almost feel the thrill of tactical combat. Someone could easily use the book to make a top-notch video game today. Almost all the design work is already done within the pages of the book.
I’m not much of an athlete (and I never want to be a soldier), but if I had the chance to participate in a zero-G game of human pseudo-soccer with guaranteed non-lethal guns and suits that freeze when they’re hit, I wouldn’t hesitate.
Games even influence Ender’s psychological growth. A vivid fantasy roleplaying game effectively serves as Ender’s personal psychiatrist, though he doesn’t realize it. And although the book came out well before MMOs had grown into their own, this psych program has surprising multiplayer dimensions. But that’s part of one of the book’s big twists, so I don’t want to go into detail.
The story itself is compelling enough that I’ve managed to convince many readers who dismiss science fiction as “kids stuff” that some of it is damn fine literature. Indeed, Ender’s Game has everything such readers fear: laser guns, bug-like aliens, spaceships, and more.
But it also has real heart. Card gives Ender, his classmates, his family back home, and his instructors real stories. Not one comes off as a two-dimensional villain, and the heroes carefully examine their own motivations, not taking their successes for granted for even a moment.
Card also engagingly tackles tough philosophical issues surrounding war. It presents a “just” war, but doesn’t shy away from the fact that war is awful and that even a just war is barely just. As does Ender, the book struggles to find new ways to solve problems, new resolutions to age-old conflicts, and new understandings of just why people fight and why they might not always have to.
Whether in the skirmishes in Battle School or the Usenet flame wars Ender’s siblings conduct back on Earth, the book wrestles with philosophical questions as part of the story. The narrative doesn’t come to a screeching halt while the author climbs on a soap box. In fact, the books seems to be a genuine exploration on the author’s part of some tough questions, not a final statement in the matter.
(In the past two decades, Card’s politics have become, to me, thoroughly reprehensible, though he and I may have started out with similar viewpoints. I can’t understand why he believes what he does today, knowing him through his work and a couple of brief personal encounters. But I know he believes it, and sincerely, so I won’t attack him for deceitful motives.)
Card clearly loves games. (They’ve featured big in some of his other books, like Lost Boys
.) In fact, as I understand it, he’s worked a bit in the video game industry.
In Ender’s Game, he presents a convincing case for games as educational tools. Sure, they’re being used to train soldiers. (Aside: America’s Army was a marketing tool, not a training tool.) But the book makes you believe that games are a powerful learning tool, maybe one of the most powerful.
With the MacArthur Fellowship granting over a million dollars to fund a school exploring games as teaching tools (the latest I’ve read about it is here, in an article by Robert Torres, one of the recipients, though it’s been in the news for weeks) and scientists and game companies alike exploring and marketing “serious games,” it’s astonishing to look back twenty years and see such a powerful argument in favor of educational games.
And I’ll reiterate here as I did before that the games are fun.
The book is fun, too. If you haven’t read it yet, grab a copy and settle down for a just plain good read. And if you have, maybe it’s time to read it again. Even when you know all the surprises and twists, you’ll find pleasure in watching the story unfold. And it’s fun to spot the gaming innovations that Card didn’t imagine. While reading, ask yourself if the book would have been different had someone put out a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game in 1985.
July 27th, 2007
