GNOIF #13 Recap — Sticks And Stones And GNOIF (Building Themes)
Games That Got Played: Castle Panic, Catan – Starship, Citadels, Dominion, Galaxy Trucker, Gardens of Alhambra, Magic the Gathering, Rampage, Seven Wonders.
Games That Didn’t Get Played: Agricola, Carcassonne, Catan – Settlers, Infernal Contraption, Power Grid, Stone Age, Ticket to Ride – Europe.
Three of the games that got “big play” were brought by guests. I especially liked the idea of Castle Panic — it’s a fairly simple board game implementation of a cooperative tower defense-style game. We narrowly won once, and narrowly lost once. I’m of the suspicion that repeated plays may show that luck is too much of a factor, but we had fun with it.
I think that Galaxy Trucker could be addictive. We’ve played it on non-GNOIF nights and I really enjoy the ship-building element to the game. Last night I was otherwise occupied with Castle Panic. Ideally I could have played both at the same time.
For a night of building themes it wound up featuring plenty of chaos and destruction. Good times!
Bad Piggies. If you’re not already familiar, here’s a pic:
It’s another physics-based game by the same folks that created Angry Birds. The object is to build a very silly machine and pilot it to the finish line. Crossing the finish line in one piece is optional, usually. The vehicle in the picture above features two drive wheels, two fans to help push, a little engine in the back, an umbrella to pull things along, and pop bottles for extra “oomph” when needed. Will that build work? As likely as not, yes. Oftentimes you don’t know until you try. I’ve had some strange looking stuff succeed when the obvious solution failed.
It’s free. There are tons of popups that are easy to click through. I’d guess that the pay version removes the ads. I got a bunch of hours out of Bad Piggies before sort of hitting the wall a bit — the challenges can get very challenging.
It’s a little silly *and* can be sort of brain-twisting. If you liked Angry Birds, or you just think that building fanciful machines might be fun, give this one a download. Highly recommended.
I’m always looking for a good free game to play on the cell phone. Emphasis on “free”.
Galaxy On Fire 2 HD fits that bill. It’s a space opera/ combat/ trading game. You can fly your ship to many different star systems, shoot space pirates, and mine asteroids. You can trade with, and run missions for, the inhabitants of the space stations that you come into contact with. Better ships can be acquired. Weapons, armor, and many other ship components can be upgraded as well.
There’s a main quest storyline to save the universe from hostile aliens. (Of course.) If you don’t want to do that you can pick up mini-quests at space stations. “Kill the dread pirates.”, “Escort the freighters”, “Bring me some possibly-hard-to-find materials”. Fortunately there aren’t any “Kill Ten Rats” quests. The quests are mostly all quick and relatively engaging.
It *is* cool-looking.
Combat can be fun. Even “very fun”. Though sometimes the opponents are super over-powered and the game will suggest that you upgrade your ship. I tried that. It doesn’t often work. I’d suggest that you just run away and go find other opponents that you can beat up.
The mining mini-game is just ok, though it’s about the only reliable way to make money at the start of the game. After getting some money together I was able to leverage it into fleecing the locals when they wanted to trade, so no more grindy mining for me.
That’s the good.
The less good:
1. The main quest storyline is predictable, dumb, and fringe-sexist. I’ve seen young teenagers write better stuff.
2. Even though I put off the main storyline in an effort to get the biggest, baddest ship that I could — I still won the game with a mid-range ship. If I chose to I *could* log back in and make more money and eventually get the nasty ships. Maybe I’ll do it if I’m stuck in the car at some point with nothing else to do. Maybe. I’m going to guess that it’s possible to win the game with only a marginal ship upgrade, if any. Opportunity lost.
3. For no good reason that I can ascertain, there are four different “factions”, arranged in two pairs. Doing a quest for one faction will shift your standing towards them and away from the opposing faction. That means that I can’t just run whatever quest I see, I have to be continually balancing my faction standing. It’s an unnecessary complication that doesn’t add anything to the game.
4. The game crashes. A lot. After a while I made a point to save every time I docked at a space station. I’d guess the game would crash about after every 3rd save…every 20 minutes or so. No better way to break immersion than to be continually fiddling with the save game slots.
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Summary: Galaxy On Fire 2 HD has gotten very good reviews. It’s on a lot of the “best games” lists. The price is right, and I got many hours of gameplay out of it.
It’s a “very good” game.
It may just be that my expectations are too high for free mobile gaming. Mostly Recommended.
Title: Small World — “It’s a World of SLaughter After All”
Game Type: Irreverent High Fantasy-Expansion/Territorial acquisition. Vaguely reminiscent of games like “Risk”. (Well, there’s a board with a map, and you’re trying to take it over. The similarities end there.)
Number of Players: 2-5
Complexity of Rules: Medium
Time to Play: 80 minutes
The Concept: It’s a silly (and tiny) fantasy world, populated by Flying Giants, Merchant Skeletons, Commando Halflings, Seafaring Ghouls, and so on. The mix of races and special abilities are randomly paired together each game. The players then “draft” their race and try to occupy as much territory as possible. When a race has been stretched as thin as it can go, or has taken too many casualties, then the player will put that race into “Decline” (retire it) and draft a new race, re-entering the fray with fresh troops. Game length is 10 turns or less, depending upon the number of players.
Mid-game chaos. Note the absence of unoccupied space.
Why I Like It: The silly approach to high fantasy is handled well. The artwork is well done. Selecting the races requires thought and a critical eye for the race/ability combos that may be advantageous at the moment. There’s a nice mix of strategy and somewhat chaotic gameplay — if you play with your brain turned off you likely won’t win. It’s fun to rampage across the countryside, wiping out your friends’ troops as you go. It’s also fun to yell stuff like “Pillaging Ratmen!” or “Alchemist Trolls!”, and have the whole table groan. Once everyone gets the hang of it the game moves right along.
The Bad News: Gary’s Games and Hobbies is no more. Gary finally decided to retire.
The Good news: Gary’s longtime store manager (Tim) has opened Round The Table Pub in Lynnwood, right on the border with Edmonds — It’s next to Edmonds Community College.
From their website:
‘Round the Table is all about bringing people together … ‘Round the Table.
Sure we serve beer, cider and other drinks. And yes, we sell games and puzzles. But what we’re really about is getting people away from their computers, sitting together around a table doing something: talking, playing, laughing, discussing, bonding … in other words, having fun.
We stopped in one night and learned to play Amerigo. While we played we enjoyed a couple of beverages.
A bit about Amerigo — The theme is discovering/colonizing islands in South America during the era of sail. Well, here (boardgamegeek description):
In Amerigo, the players help Amerigo Vespucci on his journey to discover new land. The players explore the islands of South America, secure trading routes, and build settlements.
The actions available to players are determined through the use of a specialized cube tower, which has appeared in the Queen titles Im Zeichen des Kreuzes andWallenstein. At the start of the game, this tower is seeded with action cubes, which come in seven colors, with each color matching a particular type of action. During the game players will drop additional action cubes into the tower – but some of these cubes might get stuck in the floors of the tower while other cubes already in the tower are knocked free. Thus, players need to play both tactically – taking advantage of the actions currently available in the best way possible – and strategically – using their knowledge of which actions do what to play well over the course of the game.
The game board is composed of nine, twelve or sixteen tiles, depending on the number of players. Players sail their ships through the landscape created for this game, landing on islands to plan and build settlements, which then supply resources and allow the player to earn victory points. Players might want to invest in cannons to protect themselves from pirates roaming the waters or acquire progress tokens to gain special advantages.
The islands are actually colonized by fitting tetris style pieces into the randomly odd-shaped islands. We had a lot of fun with it. The “cube” tower is an interesting mechanic. Right after we sat down and ordered a beverage I made the faux pas of thinking that my sailing ship meeple was actually a horse or something — I placed it on the table upside down. Fortunately the crowd is not the judging type…
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Back to ‘Round The Table Pub: It’s clean and well lit. There’s plenty of space to stretch out. There are around eight tables for gaming — you can either select a game from the wall or bring your own. Tonight they’re having a Euro game night *and* a Belgian beer tasting. Check the calendar, they run a lot of beer and/or game events.
GNOIF #12 Recap — Head West Young GNOIF! (Territorial/Expansion/Western Theme)
Games That Got Played: Bang!, Cards Against Humanity, Citadels, Star Fluxx, Forbidden Island, Gardens of Alhambra, Lost Cities, Small World, Ticket To Ride Europe.
Games That Didn’t Get Played: Black Rock City, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Fjords, Power Grid, the other Ticket to Rides.
Record attendance! It was a very full, and at times, very loud house. It’s a good thing that we weren’t playing golf or tennis or chess or something.
I’m guessing it was noisy at times due to the games that were played:
Loud games: Bang!, Cards Against Humanity, Star Fluxx
Medium volume games: Forbidden Island, Citadels
Relatively Quiet games: Gardens of Alhambra, Small World, Ticket to Ride Europe
Quiet Games: Lost Cities
So it was the loud games making it loud. And the Jello shots.
It’s really getting to the point now that people are able to get their games going without involvement from the hosts. That was the original intent, and it’s nice to see it happening. Also, more eyes on the rulebooks means that we’re gradually eliminating incorrect play.
Fun times! Expect a Recommended Games post on Small World soon.
8-Bit Arcade Bar first opened on November 22, 2013. We hit it on Friday night. There was a good crowd, though the photos below don’t show it. Here’s what you see when you open the front door:
Defender and Zaxxon on the right. BurgerTime on the immediate left. That’s Princess Peach on the door of the ladies room. The next picture shows maybe 1/2 (or less) of the pinball machines:
They had a few very old games I’d never seen before. Pictured is Sea Devil. It’s a pre-video game really (1969-1970). You look through the periscope and use eight torpedos to try to sink as much tonnage of ships as possible. Here’s a YouTube link to somebody playing it.
There’s a nice selection of cocktail games too, including Q-bert, Joust, and Asteroids. Six cocktail tables in total.
There are four beers on tap and some of the usual suspects available in cans. The tap beer was $5. They also offer small pizzas that are on the spendy side.
The games all cost a quarter. We played Moon Patrol, Tempest, Q-bert, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, Galaga, Galaxian, Xevious (which was super hard), Dig-Dug, and a few others. If you’ve seen it in an old-school arcade then it’s probably at 8-Bit. The proprieter said that they’re working to add popular games to the mix — the grand opening was delayed, and it cost them dibs on a few machines. Right now there are maybe 50 video games and 25 pinball machines. It’s a good collection as it is.
So: They have beer, the difficulty levels on the games are reasonable overall, there’s a good selection, and the games are in good condition as a group. And, to repeat, everything is 25 cents!
Games That Got Played: Bang!, Forbidden Island, Guillotine, Poo!
Games That Didn’t Get Played: DeadFellas, Last Night On Earth, Mystery of the Abbey, Nuclear War, Small World, Stop Thief
We got a bit of a late start due to the Seahawks game, and we’d started “celebrating” well before GNOIF commenced. The games played were mostly the simpler, faster, social-oriented games that most everyone had played at least once or twice. Coincidence? I doubt it.
One table alternated games of Poo and Forbidden Island. Table two had a couple of big games of Bang followed by a few games of Guillotine. We had vaguely more players than seats at the tables, so people swapped in and out — it left plenty of time to circulate and hit the buffet. (Like I said, it was that kind of evening.)
We wrapped it up by putting the 9v battery into the controller of Stop Thief. We didn’t play, but it gave everyone a chance to see how the game worked and attempt some arrests. Definitely some 80’s flashbacks, and by 80’s I mean 1980. There are some pictures of the controller and box now floating around on Facebook.
Photo from Handheldmuseum.com. Ours is actually better shape — we took care of our stuff as kids… Check out the size of the controller relative to that guys hand!
Love Diablo 1 & II? You’ll *like* Diablo III, probably.
Diablo III is different.
1. Instead of a skill tree you get skills, then sub-skills to choose from. Evidently it was simplified because the developers felt that the skill tree concept was too complex for this day and age, or at least too complex for their target audience. I don’t know about that — there are many popular games that use skill trees, and as for me I enjoy having to pick between two trees, or two good skills within the same tree. Want 5 offensive skills and no defensive skills or buffs? Great! As it is now you can put any skill into any slot, then select the most optimal sub-skills to go with the build. If you’re not happy with the choices you can change for free, on the fly, at no cost. I think that the way they implemented it dumbs it down too much.
[In a related sidenote — in the modern era, most games that use skill trees allow you to respec (change your skill choices) for a nominal cost. Fallout doesn’t, and Diablo II didn’t either — you had to have a *really* firm idea of what you wanted the end result to look like, otherwise you’d re-roll. (Create another character and start over.) A patch changes the game balance? Tough! Go live with your sub-optimal build or re-roll!]
2. If you’re a long-time player there’s going to be a good chance that you won’t love the new plot. In my opinion the writers took some liberties with the canon that they should be left alone. I’ll leave it at that.
3. Diablo III is easy! Like, super easy! We played two-player split screen and defeated Diablo on Normal difficulty without drinking a potion. Some of the other boss fights end with the boss dead at about the same time that they finish monologuing. I think we finished Normal difficulty with over 100 healing potions each. There aren’t anymore super high dps baddies like the Death Knights, Raptors, or Succubus. Elemental effects as a group are relatively harmless except maybe the lava. This was probably a balance decision — the healing potions have a 30-second cooldown, so if you *did* want to spam potions you’d be screwed. I think they they erred too far of the side of low damage by the monsters all around.
For reference, I remember playing Diablo I & II with a buddy on the PC. For the really nasty boss fights one person would “drive” and click the spells, and the other guy would have his fingers over the number keys on the keyboard — each number key representing a healing potion — the driver would say “healing”, and the healer would use the next potion… it took too long to take your hand off of the mouse, find the next potion, and hit the key — you’d be long dead by then.
Heck, for that matter, if you died in Diablo I you’d drop all of your gear. Good luck fighting back to your corpse to retrieve it when you’re naked. Usually you had to re-gear from scratch. (People would outright rage quit Diablo I if it were released today.) Diablo III gives you a death timer that lasts a few seconds, then you can jump right back into action fully geared, the only cost of death being an insignificant gear repair fee.
In fact, all gear repair fees are insignificant. I don’t know why they bothered to implement that again, other than maybe “we had that feature last time!” It’s just one more fiddly thing to deal with that doesn’t add fun to the game. Repairs cost around 200 gold every 30 minutes of gameplay, which is basically the same as zero cost.
Related to that —
4. White drops (commons) are fairly literally valueless. At this point (level 50) we’ve got around 500,000 gold. Whites are worth about 9 gold at the vendor. The opportunity cost of picking up a White gives them a negative value if we do accidentally or intentional pick them up.
5. The maps are only vaguely random. The exits all tend to be in the same places game after game. Part of the fun of the other versions was finding the waypoints and the paths to the next zone. Not so this time.
6. Runes are gone. No more Runewords either. The devs insist that they kept the runes. The runes now are really what I was referring to as sub-skills, above. Can’t fool me. Opportunity missed.
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Overall those points come across as “things were better in the old days” gripes, and that’s fair — Diablo I & II had their irritating qualities. If I’d come across this game completely “cold” I’d probably like it somewhat more than I do. But I think that they took a fundamentally near perfect game in Diablo 2 and made it easier and dumber. A total overhaul wasn’t necessary, but that’s the route they picked.
And it took them thirteen years to do it.
Still, it’s prettier than the old ones. They fixed some of the worst of the problems from the Diablo III PC release from what I’ve heard. (No more auction house, no more required to be online to play… two truly awful decisions.) It remains a fun hack-and-slash high-fantasy game with random loot drops. If that’s your thing, and you can pick it up for around $20 you’ll get at least a few evenings out of it, and maybe more, so I’d say go for it.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it *is* fun sometimes to run around and smash monsters.
Since we’re now in the holiday season, I thought it would be fun to compile a list of the top 10 games that we use as “gateway” games — games that are not found on the Fred Meyer Wall Of Games, but are not too hugely strange, complicated, or time consuming. Stuff that’s a little bit different but seems to be fairly universally enjoyed, even among people with limited boardgame experience.
There are no original thoughts, especially on the internet. Here’s boardgamegeek’s top 100 gateway games.
My top 10 is below, with boardgamegeek rank, approximate price, and a *very* brief explanation of the mechanic. For additional information, the links lead back to earlier “Recommended Game” posts on this website:
1. Ticket To Ride Europe (BGG #1 & #5, $45, 2-5 players) — Build railways across Europe by creating card sets of similar colors. Ticket to Ride easily won #1 on the BGG site. Ticket to Ride Europe got #5.
2. Gardens of Alhambra (BGG #26, $40, 2-4 players) — Place “plant” tokens around valuable buildings to block out the competition and win points. Somehow this hasn’t gotten a Recommended Game post yet — I’ll have to fix that. BGG link here.
3. Fluxx (BGG N/R, $15, 2+ players) — A somewhat wacky card game with continually changing rules and win conditions. Very fast to play.
4. Forbidden Island (BGG #11, $25, 2-4 players) — Work cooperatively to save four treasures from an island that is rapidly sinking.
5. Lost Cities (BGG #16, $22, 2 players) — Do you remember Rack-O? It’s sort of like that, but more interesting and better all around… Two players plan expeditions to one of five continents. The winner has the most valuable expeditions.
6. Guillotine (BGG #59, $18, 2+ players) — Off with her head! The nobles are all lined up to be beheaded. Manipulate the line so that you get to behead the most famous.
7. Dominion (BGG #25, $42, 2-4 players, up to 6 with expansions) — Card game where you create your deck as you go. If I had to pick one, it’s probably my favorite game on this list. It’s kind of hard to describe in just a few words, check out the link.
8. Mr. Jack Pocket (BGG #64, $22, 2 players) — Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper. Jack is one of nine suspects and it’s up to Holmes to figure out who. Players take turns moving the inspectors and changing sightlines down alleyways to try to hide and/or reveal suspects. A two player game that transports well and generally takes less than 30 minutes.
9. Citadels (BGG #52, $25, 2-8 players) — Each turn a player takes the role of one of eight midieval characters. The characters have different benefits and turn priorities. Collect gold and be the first to build eight buildings. The player with the most valuable buildings wins.
10. Rocketville (BGG N/R, $25, 3-5 players) — BGG hates this game. We like it. The board is divided into multiple neighborhoods. Win the majority of a neighborhood and receive points as a reward. The player with the most points wins. There’s some luck involved, but we always have fun.
It’s not a complete list, but it’s a good start. What else would you add to the list?
FlatbreadGarden 