Ooops! Sorry about that!

So lately I’ve been playing an MMO of D&D (DDO).  This is primarily because I get god awful bored in the winter since I’m an outdoors person, but also because my friend Tom plays it and it’ll be fun to connect with him regularly.  I’ve had problems with overplaying MMO’s in the past, but luckily, Emma is on it.  She’ll walk to the doorway of the room I’m in when I’m all in gamer mode and staying up too late and will meow very loudly.  I then look up and Emma stares at me disapprovingly, meows again, and then trots off to bed apparently expecting me to follow now that she’s scolded me on my sleep habits.

The Enforcer

Anyhow, I’ve been trying to get a healer up to 3rd level so I can be useful to Tom’s party, which is why I was a bit frustrated when the computer froze yesterday while I was playing it.  I cursed, tried a few more times, and ultimately it froze 5 times on me, all when I entered combat.  I grumbled, went to sleep, and ended up looking up some fixes online at work.  When I came home from soccer today, I tried a few out.  Really basic stuff, all client based (turn down the frame rate, the connection speed, engine speed, etc.)  I get in and it’s working fine for about 3 minutes, even during combat.  Unfortunately, it stalls again.  It was a different type of freeze and not something I had to hard reboot from, so I didn’t take it too bad.  I log out, and try to log back in.

Except now I can’t get into any of the servers.  Blaming myself for messing with the interface, I try to log into the DDO forums to look up fixes.

The forums are down.   So I zoom over to a different forum board and notice a post that all of the DDO servers and in fact all of the servers at Turbine Inc (which runs a handful of MMO’s and is partnered with Microsoft) are down.  And for one moment, for one split second, I thought this:

OMG!  I BROKE TURBINE’S SERVERS!

Yup.  I broke the internet.  With slider bars.  On a MMO interface program.  All you hackers out there better take a lesson from this.  Coding viruses and worms aint the way to sabotage tech companies.  You do it with radio buttons and predefined variables on a gaming client program.  (Allright, I know I didn’t break it.  Just let me have fun with my neurosis, okay?)

A Box of Stuff

So it’s late it’s late and I’m tired from moving today and yet bored, so I decide to go through some of the boxes that Hydee and I have unloaded.  I start rummaging in one box that is already open and I see a few photos of Hydee’s mom and some knitting needles and the first thing I think is, “Great.  A box of Hydee’s junk.”  Both Hydee and I tend to collect boxes of “odds and ends”, which is a polite way of saying that we’re pretty disorganized and end up with boxes of God only knows what.  I usually find tools in my boxes that, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what their original function was and that I secretly suspect never had one.

Here’s the rub though.  As I poke through this one, I realize that it’s not Hydee’s.  There’s an old driver’s license of mine, a ribbon from a 7^th grade track meet, an old game CD of mine… this is OUR junk box.  My junk mixed up with Hydee’s, and it all fits together like a Tetris game.  Love can be so many things in so many ways… passionate, sublime, sincere, tender, caring…  however, two people intermingling their mementos and having it all belong together is likely the most tangible sign of love that I have ever experienced.

Zombies!!!

Almost every list of gateway games includes Settlers, Ticket, and Carcassonne.  I’m a bit tired of reviewing Eurogames, so for my last installment of gateway games I give you…

Zombies!

I’m sure many of the gamers out there that see this will think, “What?!?  That’s not a gateway game!”  However, I beg to differ.  Zombies! is a great Ameritrash gateway game.  And let’s see how it meets the criteria.

1. 1. Simple:  Check.  Shoot zombies and/or escape.
   2. Fun: Check.  Everyone seems to enjoy it when they play.
   3. Non-threatening: Check.  Yes, check.  People are familiar with zombies, what you do with zombies (hint: it involves shotguns or chainsaws), and most zombie movie clichés.  In fact, there’s a large segment of the population that seems to have an unhealthy obsession with zombies.

RIP. He's dancing with zombie angels now.

Outside of the random criteria that I made up, it’s gone over well with everyone we’ve played it with or lent it to, including: a therapist friend, a French immigrant, a buddy of mine from college, a 50 year old divorcée friend of Hydee’s and her 24 year old Korean exchange student boarder, two hipster type people I lent it to at work, and my mom.  That’s a pretty wide spectrum sample if I do say so myself.

Zombies! starts with everyone on one tile in the town square.  You start with three bullet tokens and three heart tokens.

First turn

Second turn

On their turn, each person draws a tile and places it on their turn (personally, I’m a fan of tile games since it means you get variations in the board).  Depending on the tile placed, you may put zombies, bullets, or hearts in the various buildings.

The person then draws a card, rolls to move, and moves their avatar that amount of spaces.  If that person encounters a zombie, they fight by rolling a die.  Four or better means a win, but if you roll lower, you still have options.  Each bullet token you spend adds one to the die and each heart token allows a reroll.  Cards can be played to help you or hinder opponents as well, though you can only play one card per round.  If you kill a zombie, you add it to your collection.  If you run out of heart tokens, you die and reanimate in the town square (minus half your zombies).  At the end of the turn, you roll a die and move that many zombies one space.

Late in the game

The winner is either a) the first one to kill 20 zombies or b) the first one to make it to the helipad when that tile is drawn.

Good luck dude!

The upside is that it’s simple and fun.  There are, unfortunately, a lot of downsides.  Movement variation is wide (someone rolling ones feels cheated when someone else is rolling sixes) and when the helipad is drawn, you sometimes feel it’s impossible to get there.  The cards can be very vindictive and some people can feel frustrated by them.  The game can drag on a bit as well, which is against the fast and fun mechanic that works well for it.

However, there are some good house rule variants out there.  The ones I plan on trying are that movement equals health +2, the helipad is placed by the person with the most zombie kills, and possibly that death means you turn into a super zombie.

So what are mine and Hydee’s feelings on it? (out of a possible 5 brains)

Cory: 

Hydee:

Ticket to Ride

I have a confession to make: I had not played Ticket to Ride until about a month ago.  Why?  I suppose I am what’s known in some circles as an Ameritrash gamer.  Board game types are broken down into a genus/species kind of labeling system, and Ameritrash, Eurogame, Wargame, and Abstract are, more or less, the genus categories (examples of species are race games, route games, work simulation, etc).  What is Ameritrash?  Well, let’s compare it vs the Eurogame, the type it comes into contrast with the most.

Ameritrash

Always good times at camp

1)     Highly thematic (space aliens, fantasy, campy horror)

2)     Direct player conflict (fighting or “screw you” cards)

3)     Strategy counts, but chance plays a large part too, often with dice

4)     Lots of intricate plastic bits

Eurogames

1)     Dry themes (colonization, organization, work simulation)

2)     Indirect player conflict (usually by “claiming” something before others)

3)     Strategy is primary, chance is very minimal

4)     Minimal bits, usually made of wood, including non intricate meeples

Ticket to Ride is a Eurogame.  Now, I think Eurogames are great and I can really like a Eurogame since the play in these games can be captivating (although this is often in spite of a boring theme).

However, I can fall in love with an Ameritrash game… for better or for worse (*sigh* Order of the Stick, why can’t you be a better game?)

At the time, though, Hydee was in Alaska for a while and the only way to get my board game fix was to play Ticket to Ride online with her.  I was fascinated to find myself in love with Ticket to Ride.

The display

Ticket to Ride is elegant in its simplicity (I was able to jump cold into my first game online with Hydee and figure out the rules as we played).  You build routes based on the colored cards you collect.  For example, a route with 5 red trains needs (surprise!) 5 red cards or a combo of 5 reds and wilds.

Portland to Phoenix, not so good

Why build routes? Well, at the beginning of the game, you draw three tickets, decide which ones make sense to build, and start building.  On your turn, you can either draw (either 2 cards from the display, 2 cards from the pile, or 1 wild card from the display), put trains down for a route, or draw more tickets.

Cut off! Now green has to take the long way to Duluth

You go until someone only has 2 trains left, then count up the points.  You get more points for longer routes, add up the tickets, and subtract the tickets that you didn’t complete, and someone gets 10 points extra for having the longest route.

It really is that simple, but there’s tons of strategy involved, it’s as fun with 5 players as it is with 2, and everyone loves it.  A sign of its brilliance is that trying to tweak the rules almost always decreases the fun level.  It’s amazingly balanced as well.  Hydee will play long routes on the west coast while I will do tons of short routes on the east coast and the point difference is usually within 10 by the end of the game.  It really is all that.

Rating: (out of 5 trains)

Hydee:

Cory:  

Settlers of Catan

I realized when writing up some rough drafts of game reviews that I reference Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride a lot. It’s easy for me to assume everyone has played them, but just mentioning Settlers at the office gives at least 20-30 blank stares before someone finally knows what I’m talking about. I suppose my assumption is partly due to the iconic status of these games, but it’s also because they are “gateway games”; games that can lead people down the road of board game quality and away from obliviously playing games like “Life” or “Sorry” for the rest of their lives, sadly and deludedly convincing themselves that they are actually having fun.  I really can’t bear the thought of people living in such a state, so I’ll spend my next few posts reviewing a few gateway games for anyone new.

So what makes a game a gateway game?  For the most part, it will have a foundation of being simple, fun, and non-threatening.  If you’re a gamer and you sit someone new down with your favorite game, it’s likely an ungodly complicated masterpiece or has a niche theme that turns someone off (Hydee and I learned this the hard way when we tried to bring non-gamer friends into the hobby via Munchkin and Shadows Over Camelot.)  So you need something “safe” to bring people in with, and how do most people describe Settlers to non gamers?

"Better than me?"

“It’s like Monopoly, only better.” Now they have a frame of reference.

And Settlers is a bit like Monopoly at a basic level.  You compete for property, roll two dice, build settlements which you can then upgrade to cities, and you can negotiate with your fellow players for trades.

The first novelty people are introduced to, though, is the tile system.  Instead of a static board, you randomly lay out the hexagonal tiles face down then flip them over.  You never know what game board you’re going to have. While the tile system seems to dominate games now, it’s revolutionary for new gamers.  The available tiles are grasslands (sheep), wheat, clay, wood, and stone.  Each tile is assigned a number from 2-12.

Unfinished board

Finished board

You then each place a settlement on a corner of a hex junction and one road on a side of a hex, then the order reverses and you each place another settlement and road.

Example of settlements, roads, tiles, and a city

Where you place your settlements determines what resources you will get.  Two dice are rolled at the start of every turn and if one of your settlements touches a tile with that number, you get a resource of that type for each settlement touching it (2 for a city).  You usually want to make sure you have a balance between high odds (properties with a value of 5-9 since statistically these come up more often) and access to all resources (or a port for trading), although one resource almost always ends up being rare.

If someone rolls a seven, though, the robber is put in play.  Anyone with more than 7 cards has to discard down, the robber is placed on a hex by the player thus nullifying its resource output, and the person who places it gets to steal a card.

There is no honor among thieves

So what do you do with all of these sheep, wheat, clay, wood, and stone resources?  You build more stuff!  Different combos allow you to build cities, more roads,  new settlements at the end of roads, and development cards which allow for fun stuff.  The winner is determined by getting ten victory points.  You get one for each settlement, two for each city, one for having the longest road, one for having the largest army (soldier development cards), and sometimes random development cards will give you  extra points.

I have to say that despite that fact that I feel “burnt out” on Settlers and I rarely pick it to play anymore except for with new people, I still always have fun playing it.  It’s also a good blend of game styles.  For example, Hydee enjoys the negotiation part more than me and I usually enjoy the strategy part more than her.  Plus waiting for someone to inevitably say “I’ve got wood for your sheep,” during trading and then snickering like a 13 year old boy never gets old for me.

So how do we like it?

Cory:     

Hydee:  

(Rating out of 5 possible sheep)

Small World

I have to admit the only tactical war game I had played previously is Risk.

Quality family time

I played it once or twice as a two player game, but there was one fateful Sunday that I played it with my aunt and cousins (about 5 or 6 of us) which made me swear off tactical war games.  At about the 1 hour mark, most of the table was strategically out of the game and two people owned 90% of the known world.  The game went on for another hour, most of us got a tangible feeling of how boring it must be to be a small nation like Lichtenstein at a world summit, and my aunt and cousin took the superpower conflict to new levels as she lunged across the board to slap him for swearing angrily at her, causing mass chaos on the board and ending the game.  (I like to think that all the nations bonded together due to a common larger threat ala “Watchmen”)

Based on that experience, I’m not a fan of war games.

So despite my doubts, I was surprised to find that I loved Small World.  Part of it is the funny combos (Hill Tritons?  Swamp Dwarfs?) but mostly it’s the feeling that, even if there are superpowers on this turn, I can still turn around and crush them next turn!

Small World consists of a game board (4 different sizes, depending on the number of players), cardboard map tiles, and race/power tiles.  The race and power tiles combine to create interesting and comical new civilizations that you can claim.  You get a finite number of race tiles and start invading from any point on the side of the game board, 2 tiles to capture a space, and 1 extra tile for each token on a space.  If you don’t have enough tiles on the last invasion of your turn you can roll a die to amass reinforcements to try to invade that last spot.  For every space you have at the end of your turn you get a victory point (sometimes more depending on your race and powers).  At this point it’s still more or less a typical war game.

Examples of races

The part that makes it fun is that you can abandon a floundering race and send it into decline (you can’t invade anymore or use powers, but your civilization keeps its land and points).  After declaring a decline you then invade from a different point on the map on your next turn with a brand new civilization combo!  For example, in a game like Risk, the Civil war would be a slugfest between the North and South.   But in Small World, if the North started to win, the South could just drop their muskets, team up with the Canucks, and then OH CANADA! Here comes the REAL North invading from Quebec!  Then the Yanks could go into decline (maybe throw Rhode Island to the hosers to distract them) but then launch a counter invasion from Mexico! A lot of the strategy of Small World actually hinges more on when you put your race into decline and surge again rather than how much land you can conquer initially.   And if you don’t think the first race/power combo offered is up to snuff, you can always buy off races for one victory point until you reach a combo you like.

So far, Hydee and I have played Small World as a 2 player, 3 player, and 5 player game.  Two players was decent fun, but not great.  Three players was fast and fun.  At five things seemed to drag a bit and the disadvantage of the last player in a turn became obvious (last to pick races and his/her actions don’t really affect others on the final turn), though playing with the variant rule of having a final scoring round could possibly fix that.

I really think Small World has the potential to be one of those fun gateway games like Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan.  It’s enjoyable, easy to learn, you always feel like you have a chance to win, and I personally like the silliness factor of the race/power combos.

Rating scale based on the size of the world (small worlds being good)

Cory’s Rating:  Pluto (it’s still a world in my heart!)

Hydee’s rating:  Mercury

Outsourcing Ashkore!

Hi all!  This is Cory.  Hydee was talking the other day about how she is proud that her blog has been around for a few years now, but it seems sad that it’s not getting the attention it deserves.  She had made me a publisher on her blog a while back, but… well I didn’t have anything to say.  However, Hydee and I have started board gaming as our new hobby, so I thought I’d write up some reviews on them to help keep this blog tug boating along.

Hydee hard at work on her blog... yeah... that's the ticket.