Blog Archives
A Helm’s Deep Simulator
For all those who watched The Two Towers and thought they could do a better job of defending Helm’s Deep — and all those of us who were black-hearted enough to think the same thing but in favor of the Uruk-hai — the sparkled-up second edition of Stronghold is your game. It’s got humans. Orcs. A desperate battle to either hold out until the eighth hour or claim the fortress before reinforcements arrive. The only real difference is that both sides are competent.
Rome Didn’t Dominate You in a Day
What do Julius Caesar, Hannibal Barca, Hammurabi, Cleopatra, and Pericles all have in common? If you guessed “they were contemporaries,” um, no, that’s really very incorrect. Caesar and Cleopatra knew each other (double meaning!), but other than that, these people had about as much chance of rubbing shoulders at the corner pita shop as Ronald Reagan and Charlemagne.
So Mare Nostrum: Empires, which pits these pivotal ancient statesmen against one another in a sort of fantasy grudge match, isn’t too keen on getting its dates straight. No problem. When you’re a game about bullying trade in the Mediterranean — and when “bullying” means you spend a lot of your time being an honest-to-goodness bully — you can bend history into as many pretzels as you like.
Ten Minutes to Kablooie
Only a few weeks ago, I offered a review of five-minute game Meteor, arguing that it was one of the easiest games to put on the table for its brevity, simplicity, and real-time goodness.
Well, that review was apparently a thrown gauntlet, because I’ve been challenged to take a look at FUSE, another real-time game — ten minutes long this time — which I will never again type in all caps.
The Other House on the Hill
Things aren’t all right in Hunt: The Unknown Quarry. On a hill (not in a quarry), an old house sits, haunted to the rafters, scratching in the basement, the flapping of wings in the aviary—
And right there, that’s your problem, sir. If you want to build a big house on a hill without attracting your garden-variety haunting, you shouldn’t be installing things like aviaries. Big cages, spooky black-feathered birds — they’re all fun and games until a monster takes up residence and a pack of bounty hunters come calling.
You’ve Got to Run, Run, Run
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space isn’t a new game, and in some ways it shows. It isn’t as slick as the third edition of Fury of Dracula, for instance, last year’s reimagining of 2005’s reimagining of the 1987 classic. In that case, Fantasy Flight had the experience of multiple decades to draw on, resulting in one of the best sneak-around games ever made. And it certainly isn’t as agile as Specter Ops, which portrays tiptoeing past corporate security guards as not only a question of positioning but also one of velocity.
And yet, the ultimate edition of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is still a beast worthy of consideration — though perhaps only after being tamed with a healthy heaping of house rules.
Five Minutes to Impact
Much like Space Alert, XCOM, Space Cadets (whether the original or the head-to-head Dice Duel), or the deck-assembling portion of Millennium Blades, Meteor is a real-time game, meaning you’ve got a limited span of time to complete whatever objective has been set before you. With only a scant handful of minutes on the clock, tasks like navigating around an asteroid field, counting off how many turns until that stealth fighter drifts into range of your cannons, cobbling together a tournament deck, or calculating the odds of a squad of soldiers beating back an alien invasion — all simple assignments on their own, given enough time to actually evaluate your options — the stress ratchets up to, dare I say it, meteoric heights.
And yet, though I’ve played many real-time games, I’ve never seen anyone react with quite the same level of incredulity as when I start explaining Meteor.
52nd State
The pedigree of the new 51st State: Master Set is a little odd, what with it being a dirtied-down version of Imperial Settlers, which was itself a prettied-up version of the original 51st State. Out with the brain-slamming hieroglyphics, out with the gamiest rules, and in with what just might be the cleanest presentation of post-apocalyptic living out there. Like many other fans of 51st State, I was skeptical that this new edition would be able to hold an acetylene candle to the original. So what’s the verdict?
Oldlithic
Size matters. In board games too. The appeal of Small Box Games isn’t just that John Clowdus makes small things, it’s that he makes things you can carry around without much trouble, that can fit ten to a shelf where a single regular-sized game might sit, that provide some of the best ounce-for-ounce gameplay out there.
Take Neolithic, for example. Crammed into a box the size of a deck of playing cards, this is the sort of thing that would be easy to overlook on a game store shelf. But to discount it for its size would be doing it a disservice, because this is one of the cleverest little games I’ve played in a long while.
Dots & Boxes: The Next Generation
Dots & Boxes is one of those games that doesn’t seem like it bears any improvement. Largely because it’s hardly a game. It’s a time-waster. It’s a way to pass the seconds when you’re in a long church meeting, or sitting through someone else’s graduation ceremony, or… well, those are my examples. No matter where it appears, Dots & Boxes was always more of a testament to that place’s boringness level than a pinnacle of design.
Sounds like it’s time for an update? Somebody thought so.
Cheerful Woodland Marshmallows
Occasionally, being adorable is exactly what a game needs.
By way of example, consider Kodama: The Tree Spirits from Action Phase Games. Here’s a game that, if it weren’t so darn precious, might have everyone slamming their heads against the table. Not in the sense that the rules are complicated or the game is especially frustrating. Rather, because the goals lend themselves so fully to a tightly-controlled competition of wits where a single misstep can see you plummeting in the rankings. Transforming it into a zen-like game about growing a tree so you can house some cute-as-buttons forest spirits? Magnificent.
SPACE-BIFF! 