Weekend Gaming

I played three new (to me) games at this last Friday's game night.

When I arrived, two new people (John and Nicolette) were setting up for a game of Wolfgang Kramer's Hacienda (BGG, BUY ME!). By the time I got in on the action and gotten an overview on gameplay, Tall Guy Jeff had also shown up. Jeff had played online, so he joined as well. Interestingly, Nicolette had showed up to GHG by posting for board game players on Craigslist. She had never been exposed to Euro or modern boardgames, so John came down from his regular group in Round Rock to show her a sampling of these games of ours. Hacienda's a medium weight Euro game using territory and routes to various locations; not something I'd choose to introduce someone to the hobby.

Hacienda is an economic game at its heart. Your three actions per turn can be used to buy cards, claim chains of land, place chains of animals to market, or buy features to garner you more points for your achievements- namely, waterholes and the eponymous haciendas. I've heard this game compared to Knizia's Through the Desert (BGG); I can see the relation. Both involve players making chains, getting points, and getting in each other's way, and neither game has a well-integrated theme. For what it's worth, the components are quite well made and you get a two-sided board for your nickel.

Overall, I mostly liked Hacienda, but I didn't do too well at it; I came in tied for third with Nicolette, whereas the other two experienced players had significant leads. I do believe John won due to a too-late move on Jeff's part. After playing it, I wanted to play it again, but not immediately. After sleeping on it, I took this game off my "want" list, having decided that I don't need to own it. Ultimately, I think this one is a little too dry for my tastes. Clever, though. The game took about an hour, hour and a half.

John next pulled out Hey! That's my Fish! (BGG, BUY ME!), which I had heard of but never played. Jeff had to leave for the call of the databases, so we played a three-player game of penguins eating fishes. This one is staying on my want list, as it's effectively a nice abstract strategy game played on hexes- this reminded me of ZERTZ (BGG) with its shrinking board. I also have a huge soft spot in my heart for jumping around ice floes thanks to Activision's Frostbite from my Atari 2600 days. The hexes and nifty wooden penguins are a plus, too. Something about the emergent gameplay reminded me of an electronic/computerized game of some kind, but I couldn't put my finger on which one without further reflection.

I actually won this one, with Nicolette in second and John in last place. The game almost takes longer to set up than to play- This is maybe ten or fifteen minutes and unusually deep, given its overtly light presentation.

Just before leaving, John introduced us to Reiner Knizia's Ingenious (BGG, BUY ME!), a very colorful game. (Note New Dan showing up brightly against the green terrain.) Ingenious is played on a hexagonal board, with players laying down tiles. Each tile has two color/symbols on it: a green circle, a blue star, etc. You get points based on runs of identical symbols in five of the six directions on each hex. Placing a single tile might net you four yellow points and two purple points, for instance. Dr. Knizia's clever bit for this one is that your final score is your lowest-scoring color. Thus, players must balance their scores across all six color/symbols.

Not shocker here, hexes + spatial awareness = Mischa like. I also won in a distant first, which never hurts. w00t! I hear this game can be played with partners, sort of like dominoes. Either way, this is on my list to get.

That's real blood. (Hi, Andre!) There are no excuses in Jungle Speed (BGG, BUY ME!)! A slew of people enjoyed several rounds of Jungle Speed: Andre, Cody, Daniel, New Dan, Nick, Nick, Sean, Norman and Katlyn. All told, I think we played four-, six-, eight- and ten-player games. I keep forgeting the special rules for four players, though; most important is that Color Match is always on.

Sunday night roleplaying didn't come together, so I broke out some board games. We played five-player Wiz-War (BGG, STILL OOP), introducing Sean to it for the first time. Nick won, despite out best efforts. Poor Phil had an ADRENALINE + FIREBALL + SUDDEN DEATH combo he never got to use during play.

After that, I cracked the plastic on King Me! (BGG, BUY ME!), which saw two plays for the evening. Not bad for a new-to-everyone game, right? There's some good bluffing and voting going on here, and the art is just evocative enough, with nice components and cards. I'm looking forward to playing King Me! with six.

Sometimes I wonder why people at my FLGS pass up some deals on the discount table. Usually, I'm just glad I got the game before someone else did. Luckily, I'd had my eye on this one for a while.

Sex and violence in videogames and puzzles

This week's Escapist includes Corvus Elrod's article, "Screenshots and Boobies." Don't worry, that link is safe for work. The article, unsurprisingly, talks about marketing videogames, starting off with some interesting observations of women's behavior in stores that rent videogames.

Elrod also touches on the print ad campaign for the newest game in the Hitman series, Blood Money. Instead of focusing on the pervasive violence, the print ads push the thus-far barely existent sexuality in the game, to the point of pressing the "why glamorize violence against women" button. Perhaps more interestingly is that none of the trailers (NB, that I've seen) for the game include this sexualized violence.

At the same time that I picked up Hitman, I was hoping to snag SimCity 4, as well. Sadly, they were out of the second title; never fear, I shall find a copy yet. However, another game caught my eye, Safecracker; a pure puzzle game. You're the eponymous safecracker and you've got some thirty-five safes to crack. The box text seemed reminiscent of the 7th Guest. It was less than twenty bucks, so I wound up purchasing it.

After a few hours of gleefully working through the first some levels of Hitman, it occurred to me that I was playing a puzzle more than a game. (Greg Costikiyan's definitions, of course.) The game now rewards making the hit look like an accident, and players are punished for being sloppy: being caught on camera, killing innocents, leaving evidence, etc. Yes, each level has more than one solution or tactic (do I go on a rampage or can I pull the level off without getting caught?), but some are clearly more optimal than others, hence the larger in-game reward.

I'm struck by the intersection of these three games:



Hitman: Blood Money, the latest in a controversial game series about undetectable murder. SimCity, the latest in a critically acclaimed long-running game/toy series about creating and managing a city. Safecracker, a semi-obscure puzzle game that's a semi-sequel to a 1999 release.

What do these have in common? Why do they all appeal to me? There's an interesting rock-paper-scissors relation going on here: Hitman and SimCity have a high degree of simulation, SimCity and Safecracker are both abstracted to a certain degree, and Safecracker's safes and Hitman's levels are puzzles to solve.

Expect few posts this weekend; I'll likely be playing games.

I'm officially old

Last night on a Wal-Mart run for videogames, the Muzak system was playing "Time Warp" from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cat and I could barely do anything beyond saying "Buh.. Wha?"

Culture shock in the midst of the flourescents.

Styles of roleplaying

A few weeks ago, after boardgames (and thus after midnight), I had one of those late-night Denny's conversations with a couple other guys. The topic? Roleplaying. We had a huge outlook clash, and I'm still convinced that I came away from that looking like the opposite sort of gamer than I actually am.

I remember them asking me if, in the last RPG I picked up, if I used every rule in the manual. As it happened, I did- and it's not because I'm a rules lawyer or a Mr. By-the-Book, but rather that these wacky indie hippy games I'm playing have so few rules, and the game mechanics are honed to a point where you generally don't need to drop rules and fiat is divided between the players.

Aside: Nick, Nick, Sean, Phil, and I recently played a two-hour session of Metal Ö–pera, which rocked beyond words. The game is perhaps three pages long; I have to confess that we tweaked it a tiny bit from as printed.

Two weeks ago, over on Deep in the Game, Bankuei talks about the difference between two kinds of players- basically "Let's see how this game plays!" versus "Let's use this game to play the way we like!" In the comments, he uses a good analogy I'll use here: Imagine saying to all your friends, "Let's go play sports! Meet me in the park tomorrow, and bring your equipment!" Some folks would bring a football helmet, some would bring their golf clubs, others might bring swimming gear, and still other folks might bring the volleyball net. Now imagine everyone trying to play at the same time. Chaos, arguments, and generally no fun.

This is why it's so hard to find a good roleplaying group- people have hugely different expectations. Even given games with not-nebulous rules, players can have disconnects as their play styles clash- Bowling with pals versus tournament bowlers, or hypercompetitive players of Risk. The vast potential of roleplaying games exacerbates these problems, like a giant lens.

I've got no solution beyond hashing out how you want to play to begin with.

Drugs part two, the revenge

Half-tab of Vicodin = Five and a half hours of sleep, no reported loopiness. And that was with food.

In other news, Blogger no longer thinks I have a spam blog. Somehow my blog triggered their automated checkers so I had to solve a captcha with each post. I had at first assumed that it was a new "feature," but after a week or so, I clicked the small question mark and learned that of the misdiagnosis. I was able to request a human to review and clear me of splogging.

Drugs

So I have an abscess tooth. And a relatively large toothache, incidentally.

Last night, I woke around 2AM due to throbbing upper jaw pain. I took an ibuprofin and used some Orajel. Around 4AM, I finally settled down enough to nap.

First thing in the morning, about three hours ago, I went to my dentist and got some antibiotics and generic Vicodin, known for its ability to make people "loopy."

I don't normally take medication out of stubbornness, mostly. Because of/as a result of this, I'm generally pretty sensitive to medicine.

I've just taken a half-tab of my imitation pain pill, so we'll see what happens. Luckily, I can work from home for the day (Yay, VPN!), plus Cat is here to make sure I don't have a "bad trip," as the kids say.

The Ten Best Science Fiction Movies That Never Existed

I don't like to do a drive-by blogging with a single link in it, but sometimes you gotta do it. I somehow stumbled across this list describing an alternate history of scifi movies- one I think we'd all rather live in. Better than half of those movies I would catch opening day, at non-matinee prices.

Enjoy.

Weekly gaming session

So I finally played Andreas Seyfarth's Puerto Rico (BGG, BUY ME!).

I had already played San Juan, so I had an idea what to expect from PR in terms of theme and general play: Buildings have powers and are worth points, players choose the phase order, there's colonial goods, you sell 'em, etc etc. I'm greatly simplifying here.

We played a five-player game of Puerto Rico as an opener: Myself, Tim, Galen, Jeff, and another fellow. Everyone else but I had played already. While I played with guys I didn't know very well, more of the regular crew showed up and wound up playing their own first session of Puerto Rico at the next table over. Overall, their response was warmer than mine. I usually rate games fairly strictly according to the BGG rankings. I give Puerto Rico a 6: "Ok game, some fun or challenge at least, will play sporadically if in the right mood." I fully concede that I would change my rating after more plays. This session lasted about two hours. Scores were something like 40-50ish for players Galen, other guy, and Jeff (Galen won by the slimmest of margins a single point using the tie-breaker rules); I came in fourth at 33, and Tim came in last at 31.

Puerto Rico appears to be something of a litmus test across players; it ranks #1 on BGG, and has the potential to polarize players on the issue of slavery. Ultimately, I'm a little lukewarm on it, largely because of its hype. I know I will play it again; there's a lot going on. I really don't think I'd jump out and suggest playing this game. A good thread on BGG talks about how PR is almost a perfect information game, like chess, Diplomacy, or checkers, with virtually no luck and the largest unknown factor being the moves of other players. Like chess, there are right moves and wrong moves in Puerto Rico. I think this one is deeper than chess, but perhaps not as broad.

Definitely need to do some percolating on this one.

I next pulled out Jungle Speed (BGG, BUY ME!), as Lisa had heard about it from Steven, Marc had heard about it from others (mostly me and Story-Games), and a few people had played it last time. It's still awesome, and still available to buy. Buy it using that link so I can get a kick back and buy more games. Go on, you know you want to. Once we'd played a few rounds, folks were ready to play something different while the night was still young.

We had about eight people, and someone suggested Mao (BGG, WP), for which there was general consensus and two ordinary playing card decks were purchased. The first rule of Mao is that you do not talk about the rules of Mao. Note that the Wikipedia article there will spoil you if you choose. I'll maintain professional courtesy here in print and reiterate that Mao is a game where you are expressly forbidden to talk about, mention, or ask about the rules. The enjoyment of the game is primarily derived from deducing the game rules, observing those trying to do the same, or moderating the rules for new players. Mao is a meta-game, not a game.

More fascinating is the emerging evidence of the game's semi-oral tradition between the two players who had played Mao before, but never with each other. I got pretty frustrated and left mid-game. I'm not entirely proud of that. A contributing factor is the fact that Norman had gotten fed up, insane, or dead in their game of Arkham Horror and lured me away.

Pre-Katrina, my man Simon had recently picked up a copy of Klaus Teuber's Domaine (BGG, BUY ME!). I hadn't played in more than a year, and it turns out that Norman has a copy, which I'd been itching to play for a few weeks. The stars aligned correctly and a game commences between myself, Norman, Dan, and Kelly. I was looking forward to playing the game actually by the rules, as we had missed a few important ones in my first play.

I like this one. It's fundamentally an area control game, with players spending their money to use actions allowed by their cards. Actions include placing borders, expanding domaines, placing and converting knights, and causing treaties. Some of the appeal for me is the fun of building, but I know that I can get too caught up in that kind of amusement and not focus on winning.

Kelly didn't care for the game too much, coming in last, and Norman and Dan were neck-and-neck up until the end. I had a strong showing until the beginning of the endgame, when a clever move by Norman robbed me of some victory points. Play and teaching the game took a little over an hour.

Finally, to close the evening in the last few minutes, Norman had never played Fluxx (BGG, BUY ME!), and Steven and Lisa had just purchased a copy up at Gen Con. The seal was broken, and Marc hopped in, though Steven was planning on purchasing a game, so he stayed out.

What can I say about this? It's Fluxx. Draw one, play one and every card changes the rules: what you do, how to win, what you can do. You should play it once and see if you like it, but I'm tepid on it. It's good if you set a time limit: I've seen games that finish in less than a round and I've seen games that last an hour plus of tedium. I remember liking Fluxx back when I first played it, and I know that one can derive enjoyment from it. However, due to the inherent randomness of the game, you can eventually find yourself playing a game where the rules are not fun: Draw Five, First Play Random, Hand Limit 0, Goal: Ten Keepers. That's an extreme example, but it's possible. My ultimate assessment is that you can enjoy Fluxx until you've played one of those games, and suddenly don't want to play it ever again.

Modern Electronic Convenience

If not for DVD, I might have to schedule my social life around arbitrary media conglomerates. The pause and the Netflix empower me!

Remember the bad old days, before the VCR? People gathered around their radios or their communal fires to share in the daily tale-telling.

Occasionally, I meet a young person who grew up with widely available Internet access and can't imagine life without. I can't wait for a weekly show or a monthly comic; I only watch seasons of TV on DVD or purchase trade paperbacks of comics.

Not much else to do here beyond my further lauding of technology.

Jungle Speed and other games

If you want to buy Jungle Speed, click here.


Yeah, I played more than just Jungle Speed tonight- but it proved pretty popular. I'll do a complete write-up of tonight's games later on, including my first play of Puerto Rico (BGG, BUY ME!).