Category Archives: Games

Games

Street Fighter!

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In my last years of high school, Street Fighter 2 was pretty much the arcade game of choice. I remember how great a revelation its graphics and sound were coming after games like Karateka and Budokan. In the days before the Internet, we couldn’t know the full extent of its popularity or the boom in fighting games it kicked off, but we did know that we had something special in our hands. It had a variety of characters, each with different movesets. It gave each of them command-based special moves and it used six buttons to control, which I believe was unprecedented for the time. The boys in school talked about it constantly.

Due to this nostalgia, when Capcom announced that Street Fighter IV would be based not on the forgettable Street Fighter III but the classic Street Fighter II, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I got it. I knew that I would never have the time or patience to master its intricacies in the way a teenager could, and that it would be too light a game for me to be truly absorbed in, but I’d want it all the same just to be able to play around with the familiar characters at my leisure and kill the odd hour here and there with mindless bashing fun.

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Games

Mr. Jack and recording boardgame plays

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My wife and I played a game of Mr. Jack to start off our weekly session at CarcaSean. It’s a two-player game in which one of the players takes on the role of the infamous Jack the Ripper while the other player takes on the role of the detective trying to catch the murderer. The board represents the Whitechapel district of London and is populated by eight characters, all of whom are connected to the case in some way and any one of whom can turn out to be Mr. Jack. Yes, this means it’s possible that the murderer could be Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Lestrade.

The cool twist about this game is that both players take turns to control the same eight characters. Typically, the detective tries to arrange the characters such that the use of the Witness / No Witness card eliminates as many suspects as possible while the other player tries to prevent this. Quite unintuitively, I quickly found that, as the player in the Mr. Jack role, it is far easier to keep all of the characters in sight than trying to keep them out of sight. I messed up early because of this and eliminated a lot of characters from suspicion on the very first turn. Still, I did manage to keep my wife from guessing who the murderer was until the very last turn. Overall, a light but fun game. It is astonishing however how a game with such a simple ruleset can involve so much thinking.

Our main course for the evening was still Agricola which we played with Sean, using the I deck, the first time for all of us. The thing about Agricola with me is that immediately after finishing a game, I feel like playing a second time because of a conviction that I should be able to do better the second time around. Both of us like it so much that we’ve seriously talked buying a copy. The main argument against that is that we’d end up just playing it against each other, and my instincts tell me that two-player Agricola just doesn’t have enough competition in it to be consistently interesting.

Finally, with some encouragement from Sean, I spent some time today recording my boardgame plays so far on BoardGameGeek. The exact dates of some of the earliest plays are somewhat suspect and I’ve probably left off some plays of the games that we own but it should be pretty accurate otherwise. You can see the list here. As Sean says, it’s not like it serves any purpose, but I guess making lists is just the geeky thing to do. On a side-note, this is the list of games that Sean owns. That’s a lot of games!

Games

I’m a terrible vampire hunter

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Our regular session at CarcaSean last Saturday was a pre-arranged game of Fury of Dracula. This was our first experience of a mostly cooperative game with one player assuming the role of the antagonist. In this game, most of the players take on the role of hunters who must track down and destroy Dracula who is controlled by a single player. The action takes place on a board that represents all of Europe. Dracula can win through a variety of ways including maturing enough young vampires or simply eluding the hunters long enough. The hunters are forced to destroy Dracula before he has earned enough points to win.

In retrospect, getting the most experienced and skilled player in our group to be Dracula was probably a bad idea. Our first game went disastrously for the hunters as we muddled around the coastlines of Europe being confused about why we hadn’t picked up Dracula’s trail when we were sure that we must have disembarked at a port. We simply forgot that a port location had been cleared out of the trail earlier. That first game went by so quickly that we decided to do another game.

This one went a little better in that we managed to actually have a confrontation with Dracula this time. However, he managed to play an Evasion card just as all of the hunters were close to surrounding him and we learned that even if we won every fight, we’d still have to successfully confront him multiple times to whittle down his blood supply. So either our Dracula was very, very good, or we were very, very bad vampire hunters.

My thoughts on this game is that while at first glance it seems that deductively working out Dracula’s hiding place is important, in practice, it comes to using event cards to locate him and perhaps judicious use of the Sense of Emergency ability to pin him down. The good thing about this is that a session doesn’t take very long at long, but it doesn’t strike me as having enough replayability to consider buying. It strikes me that many of these American games have a strong luck factor. It’s been a while since my wife and I had a chance to play a Euro game. I think we’re going to try to do that for our next session. I’ve been meaning to try out Mr. Jack which should be a game of almost purely logical deduction. We’ll see how that pans out.

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Games

Our most epic boardgaming experience yet

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We held our much anticipated Twilight Imperium 3 session at CarcaSean on Monday, which was a Public Holiday in Malaysia. This is pretty much Fantasy Flight Games’ flagship product and its raison d’être. Chances are it’s one of the most visually impressive games at any store, what with the huge size of the box and the number and quality of the components inside. Equally impressive is the expected playing time for a session, ranging from four to six hours for experienced players.

With that mind, our group tried our best to arrange things to have as smooth and as quick a session as possible, with the players reading up on the rules beforehand or watching this excellent series of tutorial videos, going with a preset map and using the Age of Empire variant rules. I’m happy to report that with a total of five players, our session lasted about five and a half hours, not too bad for a bunch of newbies.

I don’t really have the time to write an in-depth review but I enjoyed it more than I expected. The mechanics are pretty neat and all players are constantly engaged with the game. I wish we had more time to play because personally I felt that I had barely gotten to grips with what the game was about and had just started carving out a piece of the galaxy when it ended. My biggest complaint is that combat is tedious, especially since there’s so little player input involved once it starts. Pretty much the only meaningful decisions the participants can make is whether or not to announce a retreat after each round.

I’m not familiar with the earlier editions of the game, so I run the risk of seeming like a fool when I state that winning through Victory Points feels a bit too gamey and Euro-fied. Instinctively, I’d like that it should be more or less obvious which player has won a game by looking at the map at the end of a session, but as it stands but that’s not the case here. I suppose, as one of the players mentioned, the biggest hurdle to jump is to understand that Twilight Imperium 3 is not a wargame. I’d been forewarned but I still got caught up in building up stuff rather than chasing points.

Finally, it’s a bit disappointing that our game ended due to hitting the End Game card rather than one player getting 10 points. It’s just feels so artificially constrained. Anyway, the shop owner won by a fair margin due in no small part to the intimidation factor of having a War Sun on the map. Personally I’m very much keen to have another session of this but arranging it will be difficult and I doubt my wife would be very enthusiastic. This experience has probably cemented her preference for Euro-style games rather than epic American ones.

Check out this thread on QT3 for some interesting discussion and insights on this game.

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Games

Drab and uninspiring city builder

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I received Civcity: Rome for free from a PR representative of 2K Games so I feel obliged to write something about it. Unfortunately, it’s a very dull game that I have no desire to really play. For one thing, despite the fact that it was first released in 2006, its graphics and general polish are so drab that it looks like more of a 2003 game. Its gameplay mechanics are also rather dodgy and uninspiring.

This is rather disappointing as it has been a while since I last played a good city builder game. In fact, I don’t recall a game of this genre really grabbing my attention since the closure of Impressions Games who were responsible for such titles as Caesar and Pharaoh in the 1990s. As its name implies, Civcity: Rome uses the same Roman theme. You’re a governor who is instructed to construct various cities in different bits of the empire and each level of the campaign game presents different challenges and geography.

One immediate disappointment is that new buildings are plonked down whole onto the map. Contrast this with the fantastic Settlers 2, where you order your workers to construct a building and they progressively move the required materials to the chosen site and you can watch them build it almost brick by brick. Most buildings only cost money, but better versions of residences can’t be built but must instead be upgraded by the people themselves once various goods and services become available in the city.

One interesting aspect of the game is that one type of upgraded residence lets you put them above shops, which helps save space in your city, but you eventually need to upgrade them again into extensive villa style buildings which take up lots of space. The odd aspect of this is that you can move around these residences anytime you wish, which I suppose make the game easier but really detracts from the feel that you’re building a real city.

Overall a solid thumbs down. It’s sad that practically no one is making this kind of games these days but if you really feel nostalgic you’re better off going back to one of the older games than making do with this one.

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Games

A Game: Sword of the Stars (Ultimate) + Argos Naval Yards

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There’s no denying that Kerberos Productions has their priorities right: in a space-based 4X game, the big draw are the ships and Sword of the Stars, with all of its expansions added in, delivers that in spades. Want to build a missile boat with launch tubes dotting its entire surface? You can do that. How about an impactor ship that can fire powerful long-range rail cannons but whose arc of fire is limited to enemies directly in front of it? You can do that too. As of the A Murder of Crows expansion, you can even build drone carriers if fielding a swarm of carrier-based fighters is your thing.

As I’ve previously mentioned, Sword of the Stars is best understood as a space-based version of the Total War games. While the turn-based strategic layer is present, it’s extremely streamlined and designed to be able to be played quickly in order to facilitate multi-player sessions. A campaign game takes place in a randomly generated galaxy and you’re given a huge variety of options on what your galaxy looks like, including total number of stars, average distance between stars and the overall shape of the galaxy. The galaxy itself is in true 3D, which can be hard to make sense of since you’re going to have to constantly pan and rotate the galactic map. If that’s a problem, simply choose a disc-shaped flat galaxy to make things more or less 2D.

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Games

The torture of playing Arkham Horror

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As previously mentioned on this blog, we’ve purchased Arkham Horror but had to wait until we got new tables to actually be able to play it. We finally got around to it last Sunday. We knew that it was going to be a long game so we planned on it taking the whole afternoon. For the first test game, my wife and I opted to take only one character each, chosen at random, but a hand-picked Great Old One, Nyarlathotep, that I’d been told would make for a shorter and slightly less challenging game. Four hours later, we gave up in disgust without completing the game although it was clear that we would eventually lose.

Being such good sports, we tried again in the evening, this time taking two characters each for a total of four characters. We did play this one to completion, though we had to leave the board as it was overnight and continue on Monday evening. Total playing time was around five hours and we lost, but only just barely, during the Final Battle. I’ve written a fairly extensive post on our experience over on QT3 so I don’t feel like repeating myself too much here. The subsequent comments from others are worth reading as well. Summary: my wife felt that it was like being tortured the whole time. In my case, it felt like a game in which things happen to my characters rather than my character actually doing things.

We’ll probably try again another time, and this time, we’ll have a better idea of how to play to beat the game, but probably not too soon! For my wife, it’s a novel experience as it’s the closest we’ve come so far to a more traditional RPG, but to me, the game mechanics feel too archaic and clunky. We probably can enjoy the game, but it just takes too long and is too arduous to play.

On a lighter note, here’s a photo of our session at CarcaSean last Saturday where we spent a little over two hours playing Agricola. Amusingly enough, there was another person there who wanted to play the same game and had friends coming but we eventually decided to join together for a four person game including the friendly shop owner Sean. As expected Sean ran away with the game but I don’t think I did too badly. Agricola is a wonderfully elegant design and that I’m tempted to buy just to experiment with possibilities but it plays quickly enough that it’s probably a better idea just to play it at the cafe.

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