Category Archives: Games

Games

Avengers Assemble!

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Marvel Heroes(2)_reduced

Being somewhat of a fan of superhero comics, I’d noticed the Marvel Heroes box sitting on a shelf on the very first day I stepped into CarcaSean. It wasn’t until much later that I ventured to ask Sean about it. At that time, he told me that he had only played it once himself and didn’t quite understand what the point of the game was. He recommended that I get our resident Ameritrash expert Han to teach the game to me. Even that was quite a while back and only this week did I get a chance to play this out-of-print game with Han, Sean and my wife.

Initially I had the mistaken impression that it was some sort of miniatures-based battle game, perhaps something similar to the Heroclix system. That was incorrect of course as I soon realized after getting into the habit of looking games up on BGG. Instead, pre-painted miniatures notwithstanding, it’s actually a rather abstract strategy game in which the players race against one another to score victory points by resolving various crises. The miniatures aren’t used to track tactical positioning at all and I’d say that the miniature for each team’s mastermind villain doesn’t even have any gameplay purpose.

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Games

Life of a Martian terrorist

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rfg 2009-10-18 22-41-56-34_reduced

Is it just me or is there something about Mars that inspires stories about underground resistances against an oppressive authority? The 1990 film Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger used this theme and it was a recurrent subplot on J.M. Straczynski’s Babylon 5 television series. Even in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, the story about the establishment of an utopian colony on Mars quickly turned into one about a protracted guerrilla war against Earth.

In any case, Volition’s Red Faction series draws from the same wellspring. Its latest offering, Red Faction: Guerrilla is technically the third in the series. However as the first two were only middling successes I gave them a pass. Red Faction: Guerrilla has become quite a hit, especially in the eyes of game critics, plus it’s now an open world game for the first time, which makes it irresistible to me.

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Games

Zerg Zombies

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Starcraft(2)_reduced

The title is what you get when I try to combine a post about the Starcraft boardgame with a game about zombies. Last week’s in-fashion game at CarcaSean was Starcraft which some of the hardcore regulars played multiple times over the course of the week. I only managed to play once which admittedly isn’t enough to form a good opinion of such a complex game. As its title implies, it’s a boardgame based on Blizzard’s popular video game. As in the original PC version, all three races are represented in the game and there are two rival factions for each race, so that up to two players can choose the same race. Lore-wise, everything is fairly faithful. The two rival factions for the Zerg for example are the Queen of Blades and the Overmind who as any Starcraft fan should know, have little love for one another.

The board for this game is actually made up of interlocking tiles representing star systems that each player takes turns to lay down, which is reminiscent of Twilight Imperium 3. Each system is subdivided into separate areas, each of which offer different resources or conquest points for the player occupying them. The resources, minerals and Vespene gas as in the original game, is spent to purchase technology, build bases and upgrade them and of course build new units. Naturally, the higher tier units can only be purchased once you own the appropriate production building.

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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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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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