All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Games

World’s best boardgame!

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Puerto Rico (2)_reduced

Or it was until recently on the BoardGameGeek rankings anyway. Agricola is currently our favourite boardgame, but since it only recently displaced Puerto Rico from the number one spot which it had previously held for quite a while, I’ve been itching to try the older game. Sean was kind enough to teach to us and join in even though he’s played it plenty of times already. His copy of the game certainly has the wear and tear to show it!

Since we’ve already played Twilight Imperium 3 and Citadels, we’re already familiar with the central mechanic of choosing roles, so we found it to be a fairly easy game to learn. Basically there are a number of roles which gives both the player who chooses the role as well as all other players in the game a specific action. The active player does get a small bonus for choosing the role. Every round that a role doesn’t get picked, money gets added onto it and whoever later picks that role gets it as a bonus.

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Games

A Game: Colonization

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Colonization 2009-10-04 23-36-11-43_reduced

For a game that now claims membership of the Civilization family, Colonization lacks the breadth, depth, variety and sheer richness of its more famous cousins and is the poorer game for it. For one thing, it covers only a narrow slice of history, from 1492 to 1792 to be exact and despite its generic name, it covers only the colonization of the Americas. Folks who might have wanted a game that covers the colonization of Africa or Asia for example will have to walk away disappointed. For another thing, while there are many paths to prosperity, there is only one route to victory: successfully declaring independence from your mother nation and defeating their forces on the battlefield.

You start the game with a motley group of colonists out to make a new life in the New World. Unlike the Civilization games, you get a naval unit as part of your initial force, so you’re expected to spend some time exploring to find the best spot for your first settlement. Again, unlike Civilization, you’ll inevitably find that while the New World is indeed a vast land filled with riches, the best spots are already occupied by the native indians, so there is potential from conflict right from the beginning.

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Games

A better Risk

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Struggle of Empires (2)_reduced

We made an extra visit to CarcaSean in the middle of the week for a session of Struggle of Empires. With six players in all, I do believe that it’s the biggest gaming group we’ve had yet. Our group was led again by Han who taught us the rules which took about half an hour out of our total playing time of four hours. This game’s basic gameplay reminds me a lot of Risk, though it’s obviously a much more subtle and complex game.

The main area of the board depicts Europe while the smaller boxes to the left side and bottom represent the areas that the European powers can colonize. The object of the game is to gain as much influence as possible and this is accomplished by conquest. You move ships and armies around the board to strike and defend as needed while spending your own population to raise new forces. You can also use your actions and money to buy special tiles which confer various advantages and abilities over the course of the game.

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Fun, Religion

One Nation under God

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35a2lhy_reduced

This painting by Jon McNaughton is currently making the rounds of the Internet. It’s easy enough to tell what the artist is getting at, but if you really need some rather heavy-handed hints, you can check out a full-sized picture at the artist’s own website where he also provides handy mouse-over explanations on what all of the symbolism is supposed to mean. Everyone who reads this site should know by now that I’m no fan of Christianity or any other religion, but what this artist and many other conservatives (in the modern rather than the classical sense of the word) in the U.S. are trying to do should be regarded by all Christians everywhere as being ridiculous and faintly blasphemous.

For one thing, they claim that the U.S. is uniquely blessed by the Christian God. It shows Jesus Christ appearing out of nowhere with a copy of the U.S. constitution in his hand and the Founding Fathers and deceased heroes of the country behind him. In the lower left corner, one immigrant is even depicted as cowering in shock as he realizes what the source of America’s greatness is. Of course, this is just one painting but it’s emblematic of the whole conservative movement in the U.S. For example, just take a look at the Conservative Bible Project, which is an initiative to create a better version of the Bible by removing “liberal” influences from it.

Secondly, the painting presents an untruthful view of history. The artist implies that the separation of church and state in the U.S. is the work of activist judges, hence why a Supreme Court judge is depicted as on the side of Satan, whereas in reality the separation is written in the U.S. constitution at the instigation of Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The painting  even portrays Thomas Paine as being on the side of Jesus Christ, the same man who wrote the following passage:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Finally, the painting infuriates Democrats because it mercilessly attacks the liberal movement (e.g. the liberal news reporter and the professor who holds a copy of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in his hand) while appropriating liberal heroes like Susan B. Anthony and John F. Kennedy for its own side. It even includes a black soldier who’s supposed to be a reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. as if King wouldn’t be considered a liberal in today’s political climate.

Of course, the funniest thing in the painting is the tree symbol on Jesus’ chest. The artist claims that it is a reference to the “Tree of Life” but it looks suspiciously like the White Tree of Gondor, prompting someone on QT3 to ask whether Jesus is supposed to be from Minas Tirith.

Games

Tabletop Civilization

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Through the ages(2)_reduced

We’re currently re-arranging our daily schedules a bit so as to be able to play boardgames more often, perhaps making our CarcaSean visits a twice weekly rather than weekly affair. The highlight of last week’s sessions was Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, which was kindly taught to us by Han. As its name implies, it’s a boardgame inspired by the PC-based Civilization series and attempts to abstractly simulate the competition between rival civilizations from ancient history to the modern age. Since this was our first game and due to time constraints, we only played up to Age 2, skipping the third and final age.

The keyword here is abstract as my first thought when all of the components were taken out of the box was “Where’s the map?” Indeed, there isn’t one. The main board basically serves only as a handy way to track the many different variables the game needs, including the Cultural Points that the players need to accumulate to determine victory. Without a map, any civilization is assumed to be able to attack any other when necessary. The only territory that the players fight over are the Colony cards that confer various advantages to the civilization that manages to win them.

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Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (September ’09)

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A little late this month because I made more posts last week than I’d originally planned for but here are three articles for September, all of them related in some way with human nature and with two of them related to video gaming. Two of the articles are from The Economist. I suppose I should try to find the time to read more widely.

The first article from The Economist covers the development of muscles in human males as a way to attract mates. Naturally, muscles in human males are useful because men do most of the fighting and hunting, tasks in which physical strength is a great asset. However, William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara believe that the evolution of prominent and visible muscles in men are also driven by sexual selection, just as the tail feathers of male peacocks are. Working on the assumption that sexually selected characteristics are expensive to maintain, the researchers found that men generally consume fifty percent more calories than women do, even after adjusting for different levels of physical activity.

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Games

Massacring natives for fun and profit (redux)

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Colonization 2009-09-28 21-54-12-69_reduced

Colonization is another one of the games that 2K Games sent me a while back but I’ve only just gotten around to checking it out. Its complete title is Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization which is quite a mouthful. This is because it is a remake of the original Colonization from 1994 using the Civilization IV engine. The original game is considered one of the great classics published by Microprose back in the day and one of the rare few that I missed out on playing. As such I’m particularly glad to have to have the chance to play this updated version.

In this game, the player takes control of settlers from one of four European nations who must found a colony in the New World. There you have to contend with not only the native population, but also the colonies of the other European powers. The object of the game is to grow the colony into a powerful nation in its own right and eventually become strong enough to declare independence from your mother nation and defeat its forces. Contrary to expectations however, Colonization is not a 4X game in the traditional sense, but an economics and logistics management game.

As such, gameplay in Colonization feels more similar to a city builder like The Settlers than any game in the Civilization series. Your colonists, each of whom can be individually named, can be tasked with various jobs, including gathering raw resources, processing them, preaching in churches to attract more colonists from Europe or constructing buildings. Colonists outside of a settlement can be assigned a job as a pioneer capable of building roads or tile improvements by equipping them with tools. Similarly, any colonist can be turned into a soldier by giving them guns.

While any colonist can be assigned to any job, some have skills that make them dramatically better at some jobs, so a big part of the game is shuffling colonists around to places where they can do the most good. Furthermore, since it is far more lucrative to export processed goods, like cigars and cloth, instead of the tobacco and cotton raw materials, it’s in your interest to build up the infrastructure to support these higher value industries. This raises the cash necessary to buy the weapons, ships and most importantly, skilled colonists, that you’ll need to win.

My initial impressions on this game are, frankly, not that good. For one thing, it’s an extremely micro-management intensive game. Most of your time is spent checking on the inventories of different materials in each of your settlements and transporting them around in wagon trains. There’s also not much combat in this game until the endgame phase as it’s usually easier to achieve your aims through peaceful trade. Finally, I have doubts about the game’s longevity since there are only four different European nations to choose from and I suspect that most games will turn out more or less the same. There aren’t even any scenarios to spice things up a little. Anyway, I still haven’t managed to win a game yet, so I’ll hold off on my conclusions until then.

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