Sneak preview of something I’ve been working on that’s about sixty percent finished:

Soon. Not as soon as you might like, but sooner than you think.

Tremors: the cheap little Flash game.

NO WAIT

NO WAIT

A while back guyincorporated asked:

Played any good boardgames lately?

And the answer to that is always “of course,” but it’s rare that I come across any that are really mindblowingly good in a way that’s new or exciting. Boardgaming is one of those hobbies where there are constantly new opportunities to acquire new games, but improvement in any given area/genre/type of mechanic tends to be fairly slow and incremental rather than dramatic, which is why old standbys like Carcassonne, Acquire and Diplomacy are still some of the best games around.

However, lately I’ve had a few glorious successes hit the table.

Khronos was a game I’d been eyeing for a while on the shelves, mostly because it promised to involve time travel and I am a colossal fan of anything involving time travel. I eventually bought the game new, which is something I generally avoid – I prefer to buy used, thrift, or trade games rather than buy new because it makes boardgaming a much cheaper hobby – but in this case I was just all “TIME TRAVEL MOTHERFUCKER WOOOOOOOO” and laid out the bones.1

I honestly couldn’t be more impressed with the game. It’s an influence/area-control game of sorts, reminiscent of Tigris and Euphrates; I’ve never had strong feelings for T&E one way or the other, but to my mind Khronos blows it out of the water. It has all the strategic depth of T&E, but it’s got tons more personality.

To wit: it’s an influence/area-control game, but it has three boards: the “Age of Might,” the “Age of Faith,” and the “Age of Reason.” These three boards are geographically identical, as it’s the same area at three different times. When you build buildings in the past, they ripple forward through time. When you build buildings in the past that would overlay buildings in the future, you create a time paradox which is resolved by destroying the “previous future” buildings and replacing them with your new building. However, there are incentives to build in the middle Age as well, because each Age scores differently from the other two: the Age of Might determines point-scoring by military buildings, the Age of Faith by religious buildings, and the Age of Reason by civil buildings.

That time-travel mechanic – combined with some very clever building-construction rules that make simply competing for control of building groups in a single era challenging enough all on its own – make for a game that’s incredibly deep on a strategic level but also requires a keen tactical appreciation of the overall board; you need to take into account both the immediate actions you’re making as well as their long-term ramifications on multiple boards all at once. It’s a brainbender, which is why a game of seven rounds that should only take sixty minutes tops is billed as a game that takes ninety minutes instead: this is a game that rewards heavy thinking without being too mentally draining. In a righteous world, this would straddle the Boardgamegeek ratings like a behemoth rather than suck-ass Puerto Rico2 or boring Agricola.3

I just this weekend also played Mr. President and was terrifically impressed. I’m a big fan of political games generally, which should surprise longtime readers of this blog not at all, so I keep track of new political games as they make their way down the pike: I recently played and enjoyed Campaign Manager 2008, which is fun but, as a friend puts it, “not a full meal.” I tend to think CM2K8 is more of an abstract strategy game glued onto a political theme (albeit fairly successfully). It simulates the Obama/McCain campaign well enough, but it doesn’t feel that, you know, political.

Mr. President isn’t new – the edition I own dates back to 1967 – but it feels political. It can be played two- or four-player, but ideally this should be played four (in two teams of two): this is a game where the tense discussion between you and your partner is vitally important, since neither of you is allowed to tell each other what exactly you’re holding in terms of potential political support. It’s a game where states can swing back and forth between parties but where ideological preference by region is not ignored. It’s a game that’s friendly to newbies, but where the intricacies of play can fascinate veterans (do I allot these 500,000 votes to Ohio or California or New York or Georgia?). It’s a game with an incredibly tense and dramatic finish as you and your partner determine where each remaining ballot should be allotted.

(It’s also a game where you’re encouraged to keep track of where votecards have been cast by writing on a reusable tally board with a grease-pencil, and that’s kind of awesome.)

It’s not without flaws: the debate rules are clumsy and arcane and over-reward the debate winner, and I think I might work on some homebrew rules to fix them. Similarly, the “only advertise once per state” rule seems unnecessary. (The “only fundraise once per state” rule, on the other hand, is entirely necessary, or else people would just keep going to the East to raise cash in New York all the time. Yes, I know that happens in real life, but you want the game to have some challenge level.) And sometimes a press endorsement can just be too damned powerful. But even with these caveats, Mr. President is probably the best political game I’ve ever played – better even than Die Macher – and certainly the tensest and most flavourful. (And you can get it on eBay for less than ten bucks! But be sure you get the 1967 edition, as the 1965 edition is a totally different game and bad.)

Oh, and I finally got around to playing Bohnanza and it was fun so that was nice.

1. Well, more accurately, I traded in a bunch of Magic: The Gathering cards I didn’t want any more for store credit and bought it that way, but trading with a store is not much better than just spending money, so it counts. [↩]
2. A game that rewards experience over strategic play. [↩]
3. Total non-interactive farming horseshit. [↩]

Robot Unicorn Attack.

(It’s a really good game!)

Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro’s remarkable ability to use excess packaging on their primary gaming product – Magic: The Gathering – has gotten truly ridiculous in the last couple of years, and every new product just seems to get worse. My favorite until recently was this “premium deck” of foiled Slivers – take a look at it and then realize that, given the contents within that clamshell, one could fit in four copies of all contents in the volume taken up by that plastic case. Maybe five.

But apparently the Sliver deck wasn’t wasteful enough, because now there’s this:

This is the “premium all-foil” special edition Shards of Alara booster pack. Looks innocuous, but this is the thing: it contains one booster pack of cards. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is a picture of a nerd (or possibly a hipster being ironic) holding up a booster pack next to his head.

And where is the actual booster pack (which, needless to say, comes wrapped in its own booster pack wrap within the larger amount of packaging)? Why, here it is!

Imagine how much less space just shipping a boxful of the booster packs would take. And in turn, less energy and cost.

However, I understand that Wizards has its smartest people over in the creative department, where they come up with amazing new worlds that all happen to have goblins and merfolk and elves.1 So, really, can you blame them for putting all this extraneous crap on one lousy booster pack? Of course you can’t.

1. Their latest one is “world with goblins and merfolk and elves where there are giant floating rocks, and the giant floating rocks are magical.“ [↩]

…this fellow over at Boardgamegeek has a son who was born premature, and who has to undergo a fifth (!) surgery, and his insurance isn’t covering everything and he’s out of work. He’s already sold games, but a bunch of other people on BGG – including me – have listed games with proceeds going to him. So if you’ve got a BGG account – or are willing to set one up and like boardgames (and there’s also a pretty complete Nintendo Wii setup there as well which is currently going for relative peanuts) – you might want to consider bidding.

As an added bonus, if any of my readers wins one of my auctions, I’ll throw in a little something extra into the box.

EDIT TO ADD: As of right now, nobody has yet bid on this autographed/certified Eric Clapton vinyl album.

Okay, so I enjoy RPGs from time to time, but “sandbox” style play has limited appeal for me: I hated Oblivion, for example, because I kept getting lost and could never figure out where the story goals were. (Fallout 3 was much better in this regard.) For the same reason, I didn’t really enjoy Mass Effect that much; it was a lot more widespread than most of BioWare’s RPG games (which I usually like) and my gaming time is limited so I don’t want to spend it running my character all over the damn place.

I’m asking because I want to know how big the sandbox factor is for Dragon Age. Will I grow old and die before I advance my character halfway through the frigging game? These are important questions if I am gonna play the game. Otherwise I’ll just go buy Left 4 Dead 2 and shoot zombies. Actually, why don’t I just go buy Left 4 Dead 2 and shoot zombies?

LIKED

– Glee continues to impress, but here is the weird thing: in the United States it is doing slightly sub-average numbers, but in Canada it is a runaway hit getting a boffo huge audience. Someone has to explain how that works, beyond the simple and obvious truth that we clearly have better taste in teevee than you Yankees do.

– I don’t generally say much about them because they’re consistently good without being particularly showy about it, but anyway: Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy and War of Kings and all the other Marvel “cosmic” comics books are excellent. It’s just worth saying, because these books don’t get the praise that Iron Fist or Hercules (rightly) get, but Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are writing the best outer-space superhero books since – well, their run on Legion of Super-Heroes. (Meanwhile, over at DC, they’ve given the “cosmic” franchise mostly to Jim Starlin, and that is… Not Working Out.)

DID NOT LIKE

– I finally played Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage and do not understand the mega-high BGG rating it has. First off, given that it’s a total redesign, it would have been nice if they had bothered to come up with a better way to handle armies than the old-school “let’s stack counters in a precarious, easy-to-topple stack” design. (Also, although I can appreciate the spirit and artistry of a die with Carthaginian numbers on it, in practice it is completely stupid.) More importantly, though, the game hinges around the battles, and the battle system is entirely too random for my tastes: even drawing mass numbers of battle cards, too many battles were lost after one or two piddling exchanges. Put this in the “a bunch of 50-year-olds were feeling nostalgic for a mediocre game” category.

LIKED

– Extract isn’t quite on the level of Mike Judge’s other brilliant comedies, but it’s still damn funny; Jason Bateman, JK Simmons, Kirsten Wiig, and Clifton Collins Jr. are all fantastic (and Beth Grant deserves a shout-out for creating the most hilariously annoying character ever; seriously, you will wish she would get run over by a truck), but you have to give props to Ben Affleck for being just goddamned awesome. I honestly think Ben Affleck doesn’t get enough props in this world.

– Strange Tales #1 is exactly as good as you thought it would be. Not sure why Marvel made us wait so long for it, but it’s fantastic. I thought the much-hyped Peter Bagge “Incorrigible Hulk” story was actually one of the least impressive; it’s still good, but I was a bigger fan of John Leavitt and Molly Crabapple’s She-Hulk story, Jason’s story of Spider-Man wanting to get into a barfight, and of course Dash Shaw’s Dr. Strange.

MEH

– Yes, I get that Spelunky is brilliant programming and revolutionary in its application of roguelike principles to platform gaming and blah blah blah but here’s the thing: a lot of little things that would have made this a truly great game as opposed to a truly great exercise in programming aren’t quite right. Most glaring is that there isn’t enough lifegain to quite counter the numerous ways to lose life in the game; the only way to gain life is to rescue the girl, an exercise that can frequently end up losing you life in the process (since carrying things is such a pain, given the loss of the whip and ability to run). There are other things: the dart-shooters do two points of damage rather than one, and given that it’s really easy to run towards one that’s offscreen and not see it before you’re getting shot with a dart, that feels unbalanced. The skulls sometimes becoming skeletons injects additional required caution that makes the game tedious. And the ghost showing up randomly is just goddamn annoying and makes the game less fun. It’s frustrating because the game is nearly great. But it’s not.

DIDN’T LIKE

– “All right, Supergirl, here you are. And you saved my life – much appreciated, by the way. But I still have to ask – are you here now as a hero… or as a villain?”
(Supergirl sheds single tear)
– “I’m Kryptonian, sure, but I’m not bad. I’m good.”
-“My father’s dead. I want justice. Together we can be justice!”

Somebody actually paid James Robinson to write Cry For Justice #3. Now, in fairness, the bits with Congo Bill and Mikaal Tomas teaming up actually flow quite well and I wish I was just reading Congo Bill and Alien Starman Fight Baddies, and there’s a nice bit with the Shade and Bobo that, one awkward line aside, feels like classic Starman. But everything with the actual star-billed superheroes in this book is total crap, and that’s before you get into the implications of them torturing a baddie who turns out to be a different baddie.

LIKED

– The Web is the first of JMS’ “Red Circle” comics that I’ve actually really enjoyed. This is not to say that Hangman and Inferno were bad comics; they were competently made bland ones, featuring Yet Another Spectre and a kinda boring guy-who-transforms-into-another-guy-who’s-on-fire. The Web actually has a pretty good hook, though, in that its hero is a guy who knows he’s kind of a shithead and has decided he doesn’t want to be a shithead (and has billions of dollars so he can be a superhero), and then his first time trying to not be a shithead manages to be a shithead anyway, but just a superheroic one. And then he learns a lesson. It’s kind of a twisted take on the Spider-Man origin and it works pretty well.

– I’m really enjoying Overlord II, more for its sense of humour than its occasionally annoying gameplay. Having command over an army of annoying hyperactive murderous runts is, it appears, endlessly entertaining. Listening to the heroic elves champion “all creatures, so long as they are fluffy and cute” is hilarious too. Really, it’s just a funny game with occasionally annoying controls.

– District 9 is good. (Insert dialogue about potential racist aspects of movie here.)

MEH

– How inessential a comic is Power Girl? Lemme put it this way: while hunting for a torrent of old Golden Age crime comics, I saw one for the new issue of Power Girl. It would have taken me one click to read it. I did not click. That is how inessential Power Girl is. And that comes from somebody who likes Power Girl and Amanda Conner’s art.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Wendy’s is doing this new line of “boneless wings,” which might be better called “nuggets in sauce.” They taste like you would expect nuggets in sauce to taste. The Asian Chicken ones are my least favorite, as they are nuggets basically dipped in a mix of honey and cheap, not particularly spicy sriracha. The Buffalo ones are worse. Given that Wendy’s has what is easily my favorite fast-food chicken item of all time (the Spicy Chicken sandwich), this comes as a disappointment.

Globetrotter XL.

LIKED

– Ghost Rider: Heaven’s Fire seems a bit gratuitous in some ways (was there a reason this couldn’t just be in the regular Ghost Rider comic instead of pumping the price to four bucks because you included a measly 70s reprint in the back, Marvel?), but who cares if it’s a bit of a money grab because at least it’s a justified one: Jason Aaron is really pumping this comic full of pure nitrous and putting pedal to the metal in the best possible way. He just keeps upping the ante more and more with every issue of Ghost Rider and it never disappoints.

– Everybody else has already given Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of the first Parker novel, The Hunter, big ups so I might as well jump on board: holy shit what a great read this is.

– Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the second Call of Juarez game, and aside from the boring gunfighter duel mechanic, this is a goddamned great first-person shooter game just like the first one was. Maybe I could have stood to see more types of gun or more instances where Thomas’ ability to use an Indian bow would have been important, but even with those issues it’s still a fine game where you shoot many bad people with bullets, and there is never anything wrong with that.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Face The Ace is as bad as you think it is: take all the excitement of watching regular TV poker (hint: there wasn’t that much to begin with) and knock it down a few notches by having one person in the match be a giddy housewife or clueless frat boy type who barely knows how to play the game. And the host – one of the second-tier guys from The Sopranos who now has no career – is ridiculously annoying. Just a dreadful show.

LIKED

– Someone in the requests post asked for a general investigation into what I like and don’t like in music, and that’s coming later this week, but for the meantime? I really got into listening to Orishas this week. I really like hip-hop combined with traditional musical forms and Orishas do it very well, mixing Spanish rhyming (which admittedly I can’t follow, but their flow and performance is excellent even without understanding the words) with Cuban rumba- and salsa-style beats. “El Kilo” is probably my favorite single of theirs so far, but “Bruja” isn’t far behind.

– I’m really enjoying Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. It’s funny and clever and hard to put down, and that’s what I want out of a light novel.

– I’ve always had an inherent fondness for poker-dice type games, and Lock N’ Roll is one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. Current high score is 7622, for those interested in beating me.

MEH

– I got Britannia this week at a discount, which is great, and of course the new Fantasy Flight edition of the game is gorgeous in most respects. My complaint, however, is that this is a game with eleventy billion tokens, and the plastic insert which is supposed to store the pieces is entirely random and doesn’t actually have anything to do with the various types of pieces, so you end up kind of mixing things together in untidy clumps. This isn’t a small deal, because Britannia is a looooong-ass game, and anything that can reduce its playtime – like, say, simplifying the storage of it – is welcome.

– I finally got around to reading all of Jack Staff this week and… it’s not bad, I suppose, but I don’t see why this comic gets so many raves. It’s a perfectly average, okayish superhero comic. If it was a Marvel or DC book it would be completely unmemorable. Paul Grist’s art gives it an additional sort of original character, sure, but I was expecting an A-plus book and got maybe a B-minus. Is this like Walt Simonson’s Thor – is it one of those comics everybody else jerks over and I just read it and think, “eh, whatever?” (Other than Beta Ray Bill, of course.)

DIDN’T LIKE

– Whenever I see one of the old Big Books that Paradox Press used to print (The Big Book of Death, The Big Book of Hoaxes, The Big Book of the Weird Wild West, et cetera) in a used bookstore, I make a point to pick it up because they’re out of print and they’re always awesome: clever stories about real, obscure things, people and happenings. However, The Big Book of Urban Legends is just terrible, because it is full of boring stories about fake things that never happened that you have already heard half a dozen times. It’s like reading a book of knock-knock jokes when you’re older than eight; you know them all already, so it’s not fun or cool. It’s just bad.