Risk Legacy: Our World In Pictures

Risk Legacy has some great and innovates mechanics that make the game evolve as you play through it.  If you are interested in how it work, and not worried about spoilers, read on.

The idea behind Risk Legacy is that choices you make during one game play permanently alter the game for future plays.  For example, you start with a "scar" card that has a buff of debuff effect like +1 to highest attacker die, or +1 to highest defender die.  You play the card by putting a sticker on a location, it takes effect immediately, but also lasts forever.  Or until someone covers it.  At the end of each game you can generally found a minor city.  If you win you get to found a major city, or name a continent, or some other sweet bonuses.  Major cities are places that only the founder can start in, so they start to define repeating strategies. Thats the basic idea, I'm not going to explain everything, but I'll give you some description of what we did to the board and how it affected the repeated plays.

Before the first play. 

Home-brew Session Report

Our group is currently playing a home-brew Mass Effect RPG that is mostly written by Ep!c.  Our last adventure was fun enough that another player wrote up a summary for a friend.  I asked him if we could post it here as well... anyway here it is.

The tagline for the adventure was as follows:

"After stopping Icarus' nefarious plot of creating a rogue planet, astrophysicist Merkel is struggling to recover. Even the citadel doctors can't wake her up from the coma but perhaps an infusion of quarian blood will revive her. Only problem is there is 23 blood types for quarians and she has the rarest type. Her only chance is to find her brother in the Galileo cluster."

Steam Mobile

 

 

Steam has finally gotten around to releasing a mobile app, and I tried it out on my iPhone.  It does about what you would expect, you can log in and see who is online, and what they are playing.  You can chat with people.  It doesn't seem to send any push notifications to the phone, so you have to manually check for responses.  Also it seems like it doesn't send the chat to the phone if you are online on a computer. 

iOS Rapid Fire Reviews

I've played a bunch of iOS games recently, and don't want to write full review for any of them, so here are rapid fire opinions.

New World Colony
Settlers of Catan meets Risk.  The gameplay is fun, and the game is free.  But the app slows down a lot, and crashes a lot too.  It takes 2-3x longer to play than it should.  If they fix the performance, I would highly recommend it.

Old game, new tricks: Settlers of Catan

The picture above shows a recent game of Settlers of Catan.  We had 5 players that night, but I don't have the expansion that allows more than 4 players.  We almost gave up on it.  But as you can see we used some black trains from Ticket to Ride, and some black duderinos from Caracassone to create a 5th player.  It worked so well that I have to look hard at the picture to notice the difference.

Neuroshima Hex Review – How Tiles are used in the iOS Apocalypse.

On a whim I bought Neuroshima Hex on the iTunes store for my iPhone to help me pass the time travelling across Nebraska & Iowa. Now I will admit I’m a cheap bastard, and I can’t find myself buying that many apps. Before this I only bought one: Flight Control, which is fun but not as much fun as Neuroshima Hex!

48 Hour Game Jam

Ars Technica has a series of three articles up about a 48 hour game jam in Australia.  Teams of 1-6 people had 48 hours to make playable video games based on the word "badger, suit, key".  The winning game "The Fifth Suit" sounds like a lot of fun, its sort of like a multiplayer Bomberman/musical chairs with built in trolling for people who lose early.

Here is a video of the Fifth Suit Gameplay.  The badgers need to collect a bunch of cards that match their suit, then a key will appear, which they need to get and take to the top wall.  Last one out loses and has to play as a ghost next round.  The ghost mechanisms looks fun because you get to keep playing, you run at half speed, and pick up other peoples cards, then run and hide from them.  Great way to get revenge.

While I was reading the articles I thought "could we do a 48 hour board game jam?"  It turns out the answer is yes, people have not only thought of this, they do it.  There is Board Game Jam Toronto where they have a bunch of supplies, they give you a mini-tutorial on board game design, then let you go at it.  The next day you work a bit more, then everybody plays all the games, and prizes are awarded for the best games.  It doesn't look like these are wide spread, maybe somebody should start one in the Front Range of Colorado!