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!

G4: Game Night with Rich Sommer

As a fan of Mad Men and Attack of the Show, as well as Board Games; I have way more respect for Rich's gaming insight after watching this.

Excellent segment and I hope more will follow.

Game Trailers - E3 2012 - AOTS Exclusive

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/55658/game-night-with-rich-sommer/

Ascension: A deck building game on my iPhone

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is both an actual deck-building card game, and an iOS game.  I recently bought the iOS version to play on my iPhone, and I want to tell you about it.  This is a great port of a good deck-building game.

Bananagrams

Bananagrams is a popular and inexpensive game available from places like Target.  It is like Scrabble, in that you try to spell intersecting horizontal and vertical words with plastic tiles.  The main difference is that Bananagrams is fun where is Scrabble is not.

These dice are driving me crazy!

I played a game of Settlers of Catan recently, and was frustrated by the dice rolling.  I'm sure everybody has had this experience, when it seems like statistics have gone out the window.  You start to think that you should have built on that spot with an 11 instead of the spot with the 6, because that what keeps coming up.  It turns out that this is exactly what statistics says should happen, people just aren't very good at thinking about randomness.

Diablo 3 Skill Calculator

Blizzard has put a Diablo 3 skill calculator online.  It's not nearly as cool as releasing the game, but if you are as excited for D3 as I am, maybe this will tide you over.  

They did a good job with this calculator, it is easy to share builds.  Here is a Melee Wizard I whipped up.  I have no idea how it will actually work since I can't play the game, but it was fun anyway.  Plus it includes everything at max level, so I will probably never get a Rune as powerful as those ones.

Bizango Blast

Bizango Blast  is a one man iPhone game.  It is sort of like Angry Birds in 3d, in that you basically throw a flaming ball at towers of stuff in hopes of destroying stuff.  Its not as polished or as good as Angry Birds, but it does have some potential.

Carcassonne Expansions

Carcassonne is a fun tile/worker placement game with lots of expansions available.  You can get a bunch of them at once with  Carcassonne Big Box 3, or you can buy them separately.  I'll tell you what I think about the expansions I've played with, and some custom rules to improve them.  One cool thing about Carcassonne is that you can use or not use any mix of expansions.  You can even use tiles from one expansion, but not use it's special rules.

Smallworld Underground

Small World Underground is a game in which you try to win by controlling territory to earn points.  It is like risk in that you control territories on a map, attack adjacent territories, and get some benefit from controlling territories.  But it only has one die, and you rarely even roll it.  It plays much faster, and is a much better game.

Welcome to the blog

This blog is going to be a joint effort between me and at least one other member of our gaming group.  Maybe we'll all write stuff, who knows.  We'll write game reviews, play reports, about variants we make up and play and whatever else we feel like.  We'll cover board game, table top rpgs, pc games, console games and even some mobile games if we feel like it.  We aren't going to try to cover every new game, we're just going to talk about the ones we are actually playing.  At this pint we're just figuring what we are even doing.  Expect a review of Smallworld Underground sometime soon.