Gaming Weekend: Board Not Bored Edition
It was a fairly special gaming weekend as it marked the first return to game-days of old now that my good buddy Thom has returned from his overseas jaunt. He parked himself on our couch for a couple of nights and we spent two days playing an assortment of games ranging from multiplayer handheld titles to non-competitive card games to some old standby board game titles to two player XBLA selections. I also put a wrap on one of my recent casual addictions, put some extra time in on a couple single-player PS3 titles and lament the XBLA DRM glitch that prevented me from sharing one of my favorite Arcade titles of last year with Thom, whom I feel is the epitomy of the game’s target audience.
Race for the Galaxy
Semi-complex games that can be filed away in the shallow end of my mind’s pool are of particular interest to me. If you’ll indulge me while I ruin the metaphor, I feel there are people who approach gaming as though it were a kiddy pool: Only deep enough to provide an occasional splash or two. Most people probably fit that description; they know and play Monopoly now and then, they may fiddle with SimCity, Bejeweled or Tetris in between work projects or they might know enough backgammon to play a friendly game over some coffee. Others prefer the endless pool approach where they immerse themselves wholly into a small body of water that has more depth than the few inches afforded by an inflatable wading pool but is hardly something you could dive into headfirst. I count the Scrabble enthusiasts, chess geeks and bridge club members in this group.
On the other end of the spectrum are the diving pools; their breadth is not impressive but they go down and down; these are for the people who choose a single game or a particular class of game that has an almost oppressive barrier to entry but they plunge to its depth and remain down there as long as they can. Historical wargamers, one-system role-playing enthusiasts and flight sim nerds are the kinds of people I count in this category.
Somewhere in the middle are people like me who like a manageable depth to their games but prefer to put their attention on a broad sampling of diverse games, going wider rather than deeper. Like a public pool, these are wide and expansive but have a gentle slope that moves from fairly shallow to somewhat deep, but above all avoids extremes. I appreciate deep, sometimes convoluted games but I could never settle on but one type of game and I have days where I want nothing more than a breezy experience mostly dangling my feet in the water.
Which is why I think I find Race for the Galaxy so rewarding. It hits that sweet spot where it demands some mental effort to grasp the game’s diverse mechanics. The learning curve is steep, but the summit is accessible. Once you get over the initial complexity (which takes about the length of a single game), the game suddenly opens up into a series of interlocking strategies that make for a remarkably re-playable game.
The game is structured like this: There are five possible phases to a turn. You may Explore the galaxy (Phase 1) which results in you gaining new cards from the deck. You may also play Development cards (Phase 2) which typically grant bonuses to certain phases or actions. You have the option to Settle planets (Phase 3) which can produce resources for you or you can Consume resources (Phase 4) to earn even more cards than you could get by Exploring and can also yield the coveted victory points. Finally, you can Produce resources (Phase 5) which allows your settlements to create Consumables.
The game uses only a deck of cards and a handful of victory point chits. Cards in your hand consist of Developments and Settlements (Planets) but they are also considered potential Resources as well. There is a wide array of variants within each card type (Settlements, for instance, can be either Military or Non-Military worlds, and then they can be Windfall or Production worlds on top of that and on top of that they can be one of four different types including Alien Technology, Rare Elements, Novelties or Genes not to mention that each possess different Production outputs and phase bonuses) but fundamentally they each boil down to cards that you want to play and cards that you are willing to discard which then become resources.
Structurally the phases work by having each player hold a separate stack of cards that have all the phases on them. At the beginning of each turn players select which phase they want to execute that turn. Playing a particular phase card gives you a bonus for that phase although all players can execute the basic activity of each phase to be played that turn. For example if I have several Settlements in front of me already, and a hand full of cards I don’t need but a couple of Development cards I’d like to take advantage of, I can play the Development Phase card (Phase 2) and get a price break on my development that turn (-1 cost). If I want to play a Development card that costs 4, I would discard three cards. My opponents can also play Development cards during this phase, but they do not get the bonus unless they, too selected the Development Phase card before the turn began.
And therein lies the pivotal competitive strategy because otherwise the game is simply a race (hence the name) and not a “screw your neighbor” kind of deal. Your only real interaction with your opponents is indirect because you want to try and select phases each turn that help you but don’t particularly benefit your opponents. If all players choose the Development Phase independently, they each get the Development bonus but no other phases may take place that turn. Ideally you weigh what you presume other players need to do with what you’re trying to accomplish and adjust your strategy accordingly.
In a way it plays similarly to Ticket to Ride, another game that has only minor interactions with the other players, because the primary goal is to stay on pace with your opponents but have that pace be more economical (earning more victory points) so that when the end game is initiated (in Race to the Galaxy the game ends whenever all the available victory point chits are taken or whenever one player has twelve cards in play) you have the most points lying in wait. In both games you can indirectly cause havoc on another player’s strategy, but doing so is largely serendipity because most of the interesting things happening for a given participant are occurring in secret.
I highly recommend this game for people who enjoy complex but not arcane card games that are rich with strategy and light on competitive zeal. Unlike other detailed card games like Catan or Wings of War or even Fluxx to an extent, where you could conceivably spend the whole game griefing other players, Race to the Galaxy requires you to worry more about what you’re doing and only adjust your strategy based on what your opponents might be scheming. It’s a fantastic strategy game with a nice (if somewhat generic) aesthetic and a ton of replay value (we tore through five or six games in a couple of days and I could have played a dozen more easily). The mark of a good game is one that when the endgame approaches you find yourself disappointed that it’s over already and you eagerly anticipate starting the next match. I felt that every single time I played this game.
More Tabletop Excitement
Since Thom is a huge tabletop gamer, we kept it up but mixed in some variety by playing a protracted game of Blood Bowl, my first since Thom left over a year ago. I didn’t have access to my Ork team when we started the game so I played with his Goblin team against his Wood Elf team, a curious challenge considering I had only faced elves once before in a convention tournament several years ago and I had never played as or against goblins at all. It was also my first time with the current version of the rules so there was a lot of catching up and refreshing to do.
It started off as expected with my team botching the kickoff reception and Thom blazing down the field to snatch it up for a quick score. His Goblin team contains a lot of special characters who can only be used for a single drive so I struggled with that a little bit at first, overloading my initial line-up with two special characters that I would have rather had later in the game once I got my bearings a little bit. Live and learn I guess.
I did rally a bit toward the end of the first half, setting up my cages appropriately and marching toward a score to even the game right at the half. However, I used my chainsaw-wielding character to accomplish the feat (and knock out a couple of his elves as well) which left me with only a bombadier (horrendous versus the highly agile Elves) for the remainder of the game and Thom was able to score twice for a decisive 3-1 victory.
While I’m accustomed to losing at Blood Bowl to Thom (well, actually I’m accustomed to losing at pretty much any game to Thom, but Blood Bowl especially), I strangely felt that even though I was soundly defeated, I turned a mental corner on the game and finally started to “get” how Blood Bowl works. I don’t exactly mean mechanically, since I’ve understood the rules of the game since the second match I played. But strategically there was always a mental block (Blood Bowl players will have to pardon the pun) between what I needed to do and how I actually went about doing it. Part of it came from a sort of off-the-cuff tip from Thom who crystallized the difference between “free” actions like unchallenged movement and risk/reward actions like dodging out of tackle zones, throwing blocks and ball movement.
The key, it seems, is to make sure that you visualize how you want the field to look when your turn ends, then evaluate what actions you have to take to get there. Once you have that you prioritize actions like so: Free actions (those which have no element of chance), critical and likely actions, critical and risky actions, ideal and likely actions and finally ideal and risky actions. Basically you want to move your players who can do so without rolling any dice to their desired end positions then execute any actions that have to happen before the turn ends but which have a high success ratio (like making a short pass from a character with the Pass skill to an agile recipient). Next you do things that need to happen but may cause your turn to end if things go belly-up like taking possession of a loose ball with a player that doesn’t have a great chance of succeeding the roll (I count anything that has a fifty-fifty chance or less as risky). I finally determined that these are the kinds of actions you use re-rolls to compensate for and I also decided that the best way to win is to reduce the number of times you rely on this kind of action.
Finally you are left with moves that aren’t going to have a pivotal impact on your overall strategy left. Away-from-the-play blocks, dodge-rushes downfield, fouls, that sort of thing. Simply start at the highest probability for success and work down.
Obviously this is easier said than done in many cases, but it beats my previous method of executing actions starting with the player closest to the ball and working outward regardless of probability or difficulty and with no mind on the end-turn configuration which led to a lot of lopsided losses for my teams. Now that I’ve gotten a bit of new insight, I’m eager to try another match, this time with a team of my own. I suppose that means my next order of business is to finish the long-in-process paint job on my Undead team.
The last board game I played this weekend was a round of Ticket to Ride Europe with Thom and Nik. Nik smoked us both with her furious placement pace that I had no hope of keeping up with since she seemed to be one step ahead of me and always looking for the same color cards that I was. If I needed black, she was drawing the black cards; if I needed pink, they were gone before my turn came around. That lead to a lot of blind-drawing which is good in Race for the Galaxy but bad in TTR as you end up with a massive amount of worthless cards. I also made a late-game tactical blunder by drawing a fourth Ticket card without checking to see how many trains Nik had left in her pile and a turn or two later she wrapped it up leaving me with a 12-point Ticket I had no hope of playing which negated one of my earlier complete Tickets.
It was a fun game although I think I’m starting to tire of TTR. After dozens of games across all the variants and probably another forty to fifty matches played online at Days of Wonder’s website, I think I’ve more or less gotten my fill of the game for now. Granted, a game with friends beats no game any day of the week, but it doesn’t change the fact that TTR fatigue has set in.
The Rest of the Mess
- Poker Smash – Thom and I had a chance to play some two-player head-to-head matches. The more I play the game the more I feel like it relies on combos—the only way to dump garbage blocks on an opponent in multiplayer is to get combo chains—which the game doesn’t facilitate well enough. The lift speed increases so rapidly that setting up combos becomes prohibitively dangerous shortly after the game has begun and the control mechanics aren’t as forgiving as they are in Planet Puzzle League to allow you to fudge the combos by dropping blocks onto already matched sets. The result is that combos are more luck than skill for all but the most hardcore and when you add the sometimes difficult to predict elements of Poker Smash like flushes and full houses, you can ruin your own combos by the sheer volume of possible matching sets. It’s still a fun game and the best PPL stand-in on XBLA, but I think if I had another chance I’d choose multiplayer PPL over Poker Smash any day.
- Contra – We didn’t play very long since Contra is not exactly the kind of game that is “new and fresh” for old NES vets like Thom, but we ploughed through four levels or so before running out of continues and switching to something new.
- Pac-Man: Championship Edition – I played a round just to show Thom the concept and then let him have several turns. I think he enjoyed the game quite a bit (it’s difficult for anyone who liked the original game to not find something to love here in what I thought was close to the best XBLA game of last year) but the 10 minute modes proved to be a bit much for someone looking to get a taste of the game. I realized that if you simply sat down and tried each mode once and managed to make it to the end without dying on each, you’d have to invest nearly an hour into the game just to see what it has to offer. That’s kind of a lot for a Pac-Man game, but it’s hard to complain about the bang for the buck.
- Aegis Wing – By far the best free game on XBLA is also one of the best side-scrolling shooters of recent memory. I had nearly forgotten how fun the link system is in the game since I’ve mostly played single-player. The game begs to be played co-op, and doing otherwise is like playing a different game altogether, one that was mistaken placed in the wrong box.
- Rock Band – As usual Joey Big Hat met for our Thursday night jam. We only played a handful of songs since Thom was around and that put us at an awkward five people party, especially made difficult since so many members of our band are reluctant to commit to particular roles. I think I may be the only one who is actually willing to play any instrument and/or sing. Toward the end of the evening we went and downloaded the new Earache metal pack including songs from The Haunted, Evile and At the Gates which Thom tackled on guitar and I tried my hand at drums. I suffered through At the Gates on Medium before surrendering back to Easy for the other two songs. I didn’t particularly like or dislike any of the songs themselves but you can’t deny that they are all extra-challenging to play as Thom and I struggled through even on the lowest difficulty setting. It’s nice to see Harmonix throwing some challenging stuff and some unexpectedly niche songs at Rock Band players but I have to admit I’m starting to get greedy and I’m feeling like three songs per week is not enough, especially since they tend to be so theme oriented which makes them very hit-or-miss. I’d prefer five songs per week from across the musical spectrum so I can have a decent chance of finding at least one new track per week to try with the band.
- Contra 4 – I played a little bit of Contra 4 during a downtime spell but when Thom and I tried to play multiplayer we realized it doesn’t support single-cart play. That’s a huge shame in my opinion since the least the could have done was include it for the unlockable original Contra or Super C. Contra 4, as good as it is, missed the mark on a couple of key areas and the more I play it the less happy I am with the overall product. It’s like they had the right idea and came so close to the bullseye but missed it by just enough to make me almost rethink my final evaluation of the game.
- Nanostray – The single-cart multiplayer is a strange competitive affair where you play for points or survival or time or something that is neither effectively explained or completely consistent with the game’s single-player action. It’s not bad per se, but it is far from what you’d expect and further still from what it could have been.
- Puyo Pop Fever – After the Contra 4 debacle Thom and I switched to some games I knew were multiplayer capable on one cart including this classic. After several rounds I came to the conclusion that Fever mode, while nice to have for quicker games, is so overpowered that if you really want to test your skill against an opponent you’d be better served turning it off because the matches devolve into a race to be the first into Fever Mode; whomever gets there first typically wins.
- Ninja Gaiden Sigma – One of the only games I played single-player this weekend, after Thom left I woke up relatively early on Saturday and dug back in, determined to pass the horde of fools on the airship that had frustrated me so last week. I did accomplish the task by entering some sort of strange trance which had me brutalizing even the late-wave ninjas extremely efficiently. The special prize alluded to before you enter the cargo room is a life-expander power-up which is welcome but I’m unsure if the extra one or two hits worth of life is worth the trouble of taking out all those foes. There is also a golden scarab hidden in the room, but I have yet to be convinced of the value those represent. After finally surpassing the cargo room challenge I stumbled forward until I met the boss of the airship level, a fat man in a metal suit of armor that shoots electric bolts among other nasty electrical attacks. Unlike the second level boss I found this guy to be nearly as annoying as the first boss, rapidly decimating my health and taking little damage along the way. Even my ninpo magic attacks don’t do much and since he has a hefty ranged attack he uses frequently, getting into position to attack him when he’s briefly vulnerable is risky at best. Sigh. I guess I’ll have to break down and head over to GameFAQs eventually but I feel like I really shouldn’t have to work this hard to enjoy a game.
- Resistance: Fall of Man – Unlike Ninja Gaiden I don’t find Resistance to be particularly difficult. Rather, it’s just annoying in that as the game progresses the checkpoints get further and further apart so you have to cut through greater numbers of enemies without one of their cheap shots dropping you inches from your blessed savepoints. I play a lot of first person shooters of varying degrees of quality and while I can tolerate a lot of crap from a shooter, Resistance may be the first in a long time to accumulate the perfect storm of annoyances that leads me to discard it without getting to the end. After yesterday’s efforts to get past a lengthy segment of the game and feeling like I just wasn’t interested in killing any more of the bland and uninspired Chimera I decided the game gets one more chance, possibly next weekend, before I drop it onto my Goozex list and count my experience with PS3 exclusives at an unimpressive 1-1-2 (Recommended, Not Recommended, Rental Only… Uncharted/Resistance/Ratchet & Clank, Heavenly Sword).
Parting Shots
I might note that I also had Thom play some of the Sega Genesis Collection on PSP and he played through about a third of Portal while I watched. I can’t say I played those games this weekend, but I was within close proximity while they were being played for whatever that’s worth.
Also I’m finding myself in a strange gaming doldrum, at least as far as electronic games are concerned. Typically during the week my gaming is restricted when it happens to an hour or so on a handheld in bed before I go to sleep. I didn’t do much of that this week but since my handheld gaming typically takes place on weeknights I tend to gravitate toward the console games I only have time for on weekends.
My game library has swollen to a hefty 35-40 video games in the last year and a half and I should have plenty to play. Still, I found myself on Saturday morning staring at my shelves packed with games thinking there was nothing I really wanted to play. I still need to finish Tomb Raider Anniversary, I have the last half of Shivering Isles to finish in Oblivion, I’m only part way through Burnout Paradise and I have yet to even dab my toe into Team Fortress 2 on the Orange Box. Meanwhile I have half a dozen other 360 games I’m hanging onto in order to come back around on and try to finish up some final achievement points but I find that since I picked up the PSP and PS3, my desire for achievement chasing as an end to itself has dies down significantly.
I settled on PS3 games mostly because they are the newest additions to my library but I still find it hard to feel like Ninja Gaiden is a “new” game and yet there is so little that has come out recently to spark my interest that my $60 a Month spending through most of March has been limited to an Army of Two rental.
My game focus has historically been fairly cyclical and it’s likely that my attention is swinging back toward board and wargames but regardless of type or genre nothing frustrates me more than having rows of games on hand and wishing I could trade them all in for something newer or better. I guess that means its time for a Goozex fire sale, but I persistently struggle to decide which games are uninteresting to me short-term and I’ll regret offloading later and which are games I’m unlikely to ever return to. For example I held onto Halo 2 for a couple of years before trading it in without ever playing it “just in case” some friends wanted to dive back in for a round of multiplayer. By the time I traded it I got practically nothing for it. Meanwhile I recently traded Call of Duty 4 after thinking I was done being frustrated by the Veteran difficulty level and my friends had moved on from the multiplayer only to find a resurgence of the game on my friends list. So it goes.
I should also note that I would have liked to include Puzzle Quest above since that was the game I was most excited to share with Thom but ever since I replaced my 360 I’ve struggled with this one game and it’s freakish DRM fiasco that requires me to re-download it each time I want to play. The game is already on my hard drive, I just have to pretend to download it so it knows I have it unlocked. The unlock lasts the duration of the playtime. It turns out there is a second side-effect where other accounts on my console cannot access the game in full mode at all, no matter what they do. As a result we fiddled for about thirty minutes trying to get it set up and eventually moved on, cursing Microsoft for shoddy consoles and idiotic rights management. Thanks, guys.