inconsequential ruminations

Dungeon Lords was a flash in the pan after all. I still think it’s a good game, but after three plays weaknesses emerged:

• chaos – you can play as conservatively as you like, but it just takes one unexpected decision from another player to turn your plans upside down. Age of Steam has the reputation of being a harsh game, but bankruptcy is always deserved. In Dungeon Lords it’s out of your hands and in a game of this length it gets frustrating. Cute imps and funny monsters can only make up for it so much.
• tough learning curve – Jeff taught the game brilliantly, but I was able to teach San Juan and fit in a two-player game while the tutorial was played through.
• duration – despite familiarity this is a 2.5 hour game. Simply too long for a euro.
• fiddliness – there is a lot of shuffling pieces around that gets tedious.

Despite these criticisms there is still a lot to like. You have to plan carefully and the theme is irresistible, but I’m less enthusiastic than I was.

Come back Reiner! All is forgiven – except Beowulf.

I have been enjoying Michael Barnes’ game reviews at Cracked LCD.

I customised the Gameshark RSS feed with Yahoo Pipes so that it only shows the boardgame reviews.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5325cfbd87112c32fb9c274790423e9a

I really enjoyed the last Noise Before Defeat podcast. It was an excellent round-up of tactical wargames which taught me a lot. I may have to try Lock ‘n Load.

I just saw the Alhambra: The Card Game preview at Boardgamenews. I liked the card play of Alhambra, but I thought the city building was gilding the lily. I have thought about buying Stimmt So, the original and simpler version of Alhambra, but it’s ugly, rare and expensive to ship, so I held fire. I’ll have to read the rules before I buy.

I was on holiday this week and I ran out of books early (An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was unexpectedly good.) and my wife doesn’t like two-player games, so I had to think of other options. I had my Ubuntu Netbook Remix netbook, so I decided to try a few computerised boardgames from Sebastian Sohn’s SoftBoard Games geeklist. In order of amount of time played:

• Fabled Lands Application – This ebook adaptation of an advanced gamebook called Fabled Lands from the 1990s was surprisingly entertaining. The program took care of page flipping, game saves and kept track of stats, so it was more fun than reading the original books would be now. It is coded in Java, and ran without any problems. The large version of the application includes some nice fantasy art, making me nostalgic for my childhood of reading White Dwarf. I would have preferred to play Planescape Torment with GemRB, but I could not get that working, so FLApp scratched my RPG itch adequately.
• Jotto – This excellent little deductive wordgame/puzzle runs smoothly under Wine on Linux. Jotto is free and playable with paper and pencil. It definitely deserves more publicity.
• Blokus – I have played the online version at the Blokus website, but this version is much better, although the 3D graphics do not add much. There is an Ubuntu package and it ran well. I could not beat the AI, but that doesn’t say much. This should be included with Ubuntu instead of the lame games on there right now.
• Red November, Strike Force One and Homas Tour (Um Reifenbreite) – These all ran well, but I could not muster up the enthusiasm to read the rules.
• Ra and San Juan – I would have loved to play these and they ran, but they would not scale to my netbook monitor’s weird 1024×576 resolution.
• Trax and Roll Through The Ages would not run at all under Wine. I may give them a spin back in London on my Windows 7 machine, although they have to compete with Dragon Age.

Playing with the Isleworth Gamers continues to help me catch up with games I should have played years ago.

We started with Chicago Express, which was well received, although I lost badly and I’m still not sure why.

We then got in a game of Perudo. This is such a classic. I don’t understand why I haven’t played it for years. I could barely remember the rules at first, but it came back to me like riding a bicycle.

The evening’s main course was Sceptre of Zavandor. There were five of us and we played for three hours, which felt at least an hour too long. By 11:15 my head was spinning. One good thing about the game is that it starts quite slowly with simple decisions, but by the end you are having to calculate big numbers and at that time of night I wasn’t up to it.

Anyway the bottom line is that Sceptre of Zavandor was interesting, but I have played too many of these Games for Accountants recently and this one lacks the drama of Age of Steam or the brevity of Chicago Express. I wouldn’t mind trying Phoenicia, as it supposed to be similar and shorter, but the ratings are mediocre, although that may be due to poorly written rules.

That’s the last time I name-drop Brian Bankler in one of my posts! In all seriousness, I am surprised that Dungeon Lords was a flash in the pan. It’s an interesting game, but I suppose it’s a crowded market.

Game Taster is a good description. I am trying to move away from this, especially now that I’m getting regular gaming with the Isleworth Gamers. If only they would chose an interesting Game of the Month.