BGG CON

I've made it to BGGCon about 7 times. It's a huge boardgame convention. I don't play nearly as many games as some of the attendees, but this year I got a few in:

Mario Level Up

We wanted to play a cute and silly little game. This fit the bill nicely, but had a little more depth than I expected. Looks like a good game to play with the kids. 

2 or 3 out of 5. Light and simple with no good reason to own it, but if someone brought it out it can be a fun time.

This War of Mine

I haven't played the computer game but I was told the boardgame was very faithful to it. It was quite dark and difficult cooperative game with scripted storytelling events. It it took a long time to play and made me wonder why I wasn't playing a computer game. 

2 out of 5. Worth playing once to experience it, but too slow and random for what it is. Computers make this stuff better.

Puzzle Hunt

I do puzzle events a few times a year. I've done about four of them at BGGCon but have missed the last few years, so I was excited to get a team for this year. We had a great time and got about 12th place.

5 out of 5

Sub Terra

A cooperative game about spelunkers that get trapped in a cave with monsters, floods, tremors, and other dangers. Pretty simple and quick. I think it has about 5 or 10 games in it before getting old. I only played once but I'd be happy to play again.

3 out of 5, wouldn't buy it but I'd push to get it played if I saw it.

Asking for Trobils

A silly theme backed by a decent game. You amass victory points by removing Trobils from a planet and dumping them into the sun. To lure the Trobils away you must amass resources. It's a fairly light worker placement game but has enough meat to be interesting. Ultimately it is too slow and a good example of why I don't like games where players take turns. With simultaneous turns, it would feel like Race for the Galaxy, an excellent game.

2 out of 5, not a flawed game but not my cup of tea.

Mountains of Madness

A cooperative game in the Lovecraftian style where you must ascend a mountain while cursed with afflictions. Each turn the group has 30 seconds to figure out who can play the correct resources to get a reward. During that negotiation, everybody has a different curse to hamper them. For example one curse is to only speak in rhyme. Another curse forces you to stop talking if anyone says a certain word.

3 out of 5, should be my kind of game but somehow misses the mark. The curses are a little too goofy. Feels like Space Alert, which I prefer.

Dimension

A quick filler game where you have 30 seconds to use small spheres to build a pyramid according to rules. Imagine using different colored Legos to build something, but some rules said things like, "all red bricks must touch a yellow brick" and "you can only put blue bricks on the bottom level".

4 of 5, a perfect filler who's only sin is being too quick and simple.

Loot Island

Try to force the pirate ship to dig for treasure at a location where you will get the most loot. There are different types of loot that score differently. Feels a lot like Dragon's Gold with a hint of something like Ra.

2 of 5, too slow for what it is. I'm sick of this multiple victory point theme. I'd rather play Dragon's Gold, Ra, Medici, or a slew of other similar games. If it had simultaneous turns, it would be much better.

Flick Em Up Dead of Winter

With the Flick Em Up games you have meeples on a table with terrain, like carboard buildings, cars, barrels, lamp posts, etc. You move and attack by flicking a disc. This game was Dead of Winter themed, but really it was indistinguishable from any other zombie game. It had some cleverness to it. The rules for the scenario apparently were convoluted. 

3 of 5, I love me a flicky game but there are plenty to choose from and this does not distinguish itself. I could give it a 5 if it were the only flicky game I knew about. Also, zombies aren't my favorite theme, even though I do own Dead of Winter.

Viral

Game about viruses infecting a body. Really just an area control game. You evolve special powers. The turns are somewhat simultaneous but the resolution is serial and you often change your mind based on the previous players. There are some clever mechanics, but there are countless area control games with clever mechanics. I suspect winning strategies require annoying calculations like trying to be in last place on the penultimate turn so you can set up a monster final turn.

2 of 5, maybe I would have liked it more if we had played more quickly. I'm pretty jaded to this type of game.

Unlock!

Basically an escape room told through a phone app and story cards. I really like the puzzle aspect, but both games I played were ruined by not understanding the very simple mechanics. 

3 of 5, it has potential to scratch the puzzle itch but there are so many other sources of puzzles I am not sure how to recommend buying this one.

Too Many Bones

Probably the winner of the con for me. A cooperative dice adventure rpg where you level up and kill monsters and get loot. Each class plays very differently. We had a lot of tense moments but made it to the final boss. In the end we almost won the fight, but not quite. Sadly, I don't see it for sale for less than about $300.

4 of 5, fun but pretty brutal. Seemed to take longer than it should have.

Barbuda

We have a con tradition to play card games in the wee hours. This year the game was Barbuda, a strange game that combines hearts, spades, and some other similar games.

5 of 5, the king of all card games

Njet

At 5 am we finished Barbuda but wanted more. We started Njet to accommodate a 5th player. 5 am trick taking is lots of fun. Njet is sort of a generic tricks and trumps game but you have a bidding process to determine trump, scoring, card passing, etc.

4 of 5, a little deeper than Oh Hell / Wizard, hearts, or Spades. 

Offworld Trading Company

Offworld Trading Company combines the best aspects of a Real Time Strategy game and watching the Business Channel.

Summary

You represent a corporation building mines and factories on Mars to assist a new colony. Competing for that business are other companies. You must predict the needs of the market, grow your business efficiently, and possibly sabotage your competitors.

Gameplay

The gameplay feel a little bit like a RTS in that you must make tough real time decisions about what structures to build and that greatly informs how the game will play out. There is a ton of strategy about these decisions. Each corporation consumes resources in different amounts, and you also want to provide for the needs of the colony. These means you likely want to create the resources you will need but also might supply resources that your competitors will buy.

In addition to building structures, you buy and sell goods on the stock market. As materials are consumed by corporations and the colony, the price will go up. When people sell their supply the price goes down. Generally market manipulation doesn't seem to work as well as predicting supply and demand, but it's all pertinent. 

Exploration

At the start of the game the map is filled with fog of war. You click around to revel the map to find resources. Eventually when you find a good place to land your base you take it. Grabbing a landing spot early grants an advantage in that you get to claim the nearby resources. Also, your workers can start working while the other players are still exploring. On the other hand, the last players to drop their base are given a few bonuses, like extra tiles to claim. This is a neat concept, but I don't like the implementation. Once you place your base, all fog is lifted so you can see if your base is in a good location or not. Sometimes you don't realize there is a shortage of materials and your workers will have to move across the whole map to mine something rare. Other times you think you are monopolizing a resource to find there were two giant caches you didn't scan. 

In many games, the positioning isn't very important. There are sufficient resources, or maybe fuel is cheap for remote workers. So in some games you want to drop your base early, others late, and often it doesn't really matter. This leads to and awkward system that probably could have been skipped. Perhaps it would be better if players could see the entire map and then got to bid on placement order.

Combat

There isn't really combat. Direct aggression comes from the Black Market where you can buy items that help you or hurt an opponent. This isn't my favorite part of the game, but it doesn't bother me. The game has a steep learning curve and this should have been introduced later, but you can disable it in the game options, so not a big deal.

The other form of aggression is price war. If you can monopolize a rare resource you can force the other players to pay a lot to obtain it. In my experience this is a good idea more because you can sell for a higher price, but it's also nice that the opponents must buy at a higher price.

Winning

Depending on the mode the game either ends after a certain number of days or when one corporations has bought out all the others. Both of these have a bit of awkwardness. When the game ends after a set time, you don't get credit for any stockpiles you have, so you have to be constantly aware of the time. Buying out corporations has its own set of problems. You have to figure out if you should buy stock early when its cheap, or invest that money into buildings to grow your economy. You can't buy your own stock from another company but they can buy it from you. This mean games often end with two companies trying to buy each other up as quickly as possible, and it feels weird. 

Overall

This is a fun and challenging game. It took many games before I could win a stand-alone scenario on the hardest difficulty. The campaign is interesting but after losing twice I gave up. A few aspects of the game could be changed someone to make it more fun. In some ways this is the perfect game for me. I'm always looking for real-time crafting games with a strong economy and Offworld Trading Company nails it. For me, this game is 7/10 but I suspect most people would rate it lower.

King's Bounty: The Legend

Been sitting on this for a while. Recently I wanted a turn based strategy game so gave it a try.

Overview

I did not care for the game. Combat was slow and boring. The story didn't engage me. Perhaps I was in a foul mood when I played. I wanted a hard-core strategy and this game was far too light.

Sam and Max

When I was younger I really enjoyed the LucasArts Sam & Max game and I've been enjoying the Telltale games so I bought the big Sam and Max bundle.

Overview

Sam and Max is a series of about 15 games from Telltale. They tell the story of a large talking dog named Sam and an ultra violent rabbit named Max. It's a typical puzzle game. Most of the game involves clicking the screen to move Sam around and clicking on objects to see what they do. There is also a lot of dialog. The major appeal of the game is the humor.

Opinions

I liked the game well enough to finish, but it was a close call. The humor was fine but I didn't find any hilarious moments like I remembered from the old Sam & Max Hit the Road. The puzzles are not as clever as Lucas Arts games and not as engaging as Telltale games. Some of the puzzles were too obscure and I had to either grind through them or read spoilers.

Conclusion

These games are dirt cheap so there isn't much penalty to try it. You might adore the humor. I'm going to at least give the second one in the series a look.

Realm Grinder

A few years ago Cookie Clicker came out. It was the first "real game" of that genre that I had seen. Since then a variety of grinder type games have come out. I usually avoid games of mindless clicking, but Realm Grinder seemed to have some strategic depth to it.

Overview

The setting is generically fantasy based, but that's a thin veil for the underlying mechanics. At the start, you click on the screen to earn gold which is spent on buildings and upgrades. Buildings mostly just provide income per second although when upgraded they can provide other bonuses. The upgrades do all sorts of things, but basically affect how quickly you generate gold and faction coins.

Goal

I'm not sure there is a final goal of the game although it wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps the goal is to see how often you can reincarnate. There is the opportunity for personal goals like, "try every race" or "beat every challenge".

Stages

The game has discrete stages, although they feel more like cycles.

Runs

The runis like what you would expect out of a single game of this type. You click some, build buildings, try to find an efficient path to generate more income, and eventually you quit when you just can't meaningfully increase your income. For a game like Cookie Clicker, you are done. You might start over to find a more optimized strategy, or you might lament wasting time on a pointless pursuit. In Realm Grinder, you don't quit, you abdicate.

Abdication

As you play the game you earn gems. These gems are meaningless until you abdicate. Abdication basically resets the game and you start over from scratch. You get a boost, however, in the form of trophies and gems.

Trophies are basically achievements. Some are purely grinding like "build 10 farms". Others involve difficult challenges like "build exactly 1 of each building". Some require special circumstance like "build a church on Sunday". Trophies have a tangible benefit in that one of the most productive buildings in the game gets a bonus based on the number of trophies you earn. This means that the more you play, the easier it is to get gold.

The real boost comes from gems. Each gem you earn is a global 2% bonus to production. That means if I earn 100 gems my first game, after I abdicate all my buildings will produce an extra 200% more. A typical goal is to earn 20 to 100 times as many gems as you started your run with, so you pretty quickly are earning 1,000,000% or more on your buildings. 

Reincarnation

The goal of abdicating is to get enough gems to reincarnate. When this happens, you lose all of your gems and get some reincarnation bonuses. These bonuses include extra production multipliers and access to additional features, like challenges and new races. Each reincarnation requires many more gems than the previous one.

Strategy

At the basic run level, there is the minor strategy that all clicker games have. Do you build a building or an upgrade? Do you focus on upgrades click rewards or passive production? I find this fairly minor and uninteresting in Realm Grinder, at least past the first run. 

More interesting strategies come from deciding which race to play for a given run. It might depend on how many gems you have, because some races do well in a low-gem run while others do better with high-gems. You also might choose a race depending on how long you have to make your run -- if you plan to abdicate in 10 minutes you want a different race than if you are going to let the game run overnight. Also, your level of activity is important. Angels cast a lot of spells, but that requires paying constant attention to the game. Other races do well with moderate interaction as long as you can poke the screen every few minutes. The undead race give bonuses for the game running offline, so you might choose them if you start a game before going to bed. In addition, you might choose a certain race to get a trophy.

Final Thoughts

When I first started Realm Grinder, I expected a pointless clicker game. Instead I was surprised and amused at how much thought went into turning a pointless clicker game into a strategy game. It's similar to how I feel about all the match-3 evolutions out there. If you are looking for a free mindless time-waster, Realm Grinder isn't a bad choice.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 -- Original

Finished Battlefront 2 a couple weeks ago. It was the original one with a good single player campaign and out of date graphics. I mostly enjoyed it but only because I'm a Star Wars nerd. Hopefully the upcoming EA Battlefront 2 will have a decent single player campaign and there won't be any reason to play the old game.

The most memorable moment was assaulting the Jedi temple during Order 66. I'm used to Jedi being good guys so I was slow to shoot them. And there is nothing as terrifying as a horde of Jedi charging at hapless stormtroopers.

Mass Effect 3

Despite a three month hiatus in the middle of my playthough, I went back and finished Mass Effect 3. Awesome game.

The Trilogy

I've played all three games in the trilogy, although each of them was at least 5 years late. There were some truly great moments and I'm looking forward to Mass Effect Andromeda in a few years when I get around to it.

Overall, Mass Effect is great story telling. It is epic and engaging. The writing is generally excellent. The graphics are surprisingly good, especially in cutscenes.

Memorable Moments

Three moments stick out for me from the trilogy.

Samara and Morinth

In Mass Effect 2 you recruit an Asari justicar named Samara. At some point you accept a mission to help her track down and kill her evil daughter, Morinth. Well, I hadn't really clicked with Samara. She hadn't been on my crew for very long and I didn't fully get along with her. She was a little bit too goody-goody for me. When we went to hunt down her daughter there was a moment when Morinth tempted me with power and excitement. For just a split second I was tempted and helped her kill Samara. I immediately regretted the decision and almost loaded a save game. Instead I decided to live with the consequences. That's part of the game, right? 

Tali and the Geth

In Mass Effect 3 you sort of have to choose between saving the Quarians and the Geth. I was feeling ballsy and tried to save both. Tali tried to order the Quarian fleet to stand down, but generations of hatred wouldn't let them and their whole race was exterminated. Overcome by unbearable sadness, Tali takes her own life. I tried to stop her, but I was too involved in the cutscene and didn't notice the "save Tali" button until it was too late. I don't feel too much guilt for the Quarians -- I was asked to choose between two races and one of them wanted to cooperate. However being too slow to save Tali made me sad (even though I later read that she might have been impossible to save even if I was faster).

Activating the Crucible

The ending of Mass Effect 3 received a lot of criticism for various reasons. I liked it pretty well. My only complaint was not enough exposition. I wanted to explore the ramifications of the choices more deeply. But that's a big trait of Commander Shepard. He makes big decisions with little knowledge and he is usually right. The game sometimes uses that style to trick the player into morally ambiguous decisions.

I decided not to activate the crucible, dooming the galaxy to another cycle of Reapers. Killing the Reapers meant killing all synthetic life, and some people with synthetic parts. I already had some guilt at exterminating the Quarians in favor of the Geth, and I didn't want to willfully genocide that race as well. I had some attachment to EDI, who ran the last mission with me. Also, I feared for Miranda with her implants. Even in the best cast scenario, the Krogan would likely conquer the galaxy since I had cured the genophage. Additionally, the Catalyst said he was there to solve the problem of synthetic life vs organic life. Eventually the galaxy would create more synthetic life and would be back to the problems that the Protheans initially faced. By activating the crucible I might be setting the galaxy back thousands of years, would likely be dooming the galaxy to enslavement by the Krogan, and would certainly be genociding the Geth and dooming EDI and other friends.

I had the option to control the Reapers. I should have chose this, but I was tired. Not only was it 3am in real life, but Shepard had just finished being blown up, knocked out, and shot. There was ten minutes of Shepard being barely alive and it felt like a relief when he and his buddy let go of life at the end. When the radio woke Shepard up, I felt his pain. He did his duty and wanted to rest. So when the Catalyst said that Shepard's body would die but his mind would change and live eternally, it sounded like torture. It seemed very likely that Shepard would eventually take over the Catalyst's task of wiping out the galaxy every so often. I just didn't want to live in that Hell. I'd rather the current Catalyst keep his job than be the one to slaughter everybody every few hundred years.

So I decided to continue the cycle. Everything Shepard achieved was for nothing. Everybody's sacrifices wasted. Kind of sucks. But every cycle grew closer to completing the crucible and stopping the Reapers. Maybe next cycle there would be another Shepard who could find a better choice. For example, I wasn't offered the choice of synthesis. Maybe next cycle a better Shepard will achieve it. Liara's message to the future left me with some hope.

Controls

I'm a PC gamer and generally hate games where you can feel the console in the controls. Mass Effect is no exception. The controls is the worst part of the game. I've played it on console and hate it more. The only way to make it work is to have completely different control systems. Don't even try to reuse elements. Even things like the radial menus on the PC are annoying. 

Combat in The Division has a similar feel but is much cleaner. Fallout 4 also does a decent job with combat despite some annoying controls in the rest of the UI.

Combat

Combats were mediocre. They were a great tool for the story telling, but weren't great by themselves. I played long range sniper and combat rifle. Fighting from cover was reasonably fun but anything that involved running around was too chaotic. Battlefields were cluttered so I couldn't retreat backwards while firing very effectively. When getting swarmed I had to turn and run, which was generally too effective for getting away, and then too awkward at getting set up behind cover. The Division did a much better job at fighting from cover, although it doesn't really do melee.

The squad combat is still pretty mediocre. Not sure what the solution is. I appreciate that the player needs to be the hero in a very visceral first-person way, but the two buddies don't quite do it for me. They don't seem very effective and yet I don't want to micro manage them and I don't want them to out-shine me. It felt better in Mass Effect 2 for some reason. I mean it almost worked, but not quite. I want Garrus and Ash to provide distracting fire while I flank. I want Ash and James to protect my flank while I snipe. I want Liara to pull entrenched targets into the air. I want EDI's decoys to save the day when we get overrun and to draw out the enemy when they are hard to hit. They already do this to some extent, but not enough.