Pool Nation: Best Pool game ever?

So I purchased the Humble weekly sale, mainly to get Trainz 2012, but along with it came Pool Nation. I like a bit of pool down the local pub, so I fired it up and had a go, not expecting much.

What a game. The ball physics seem spot on, and the amount of different style of shots you can do is mind boggling. Swerves, jumps, even off the rim of the table and on top of a ball, the list goes on.

With variations of American pool, 9 ball and 8 ball, games like killer pop up aswell. Theres a satisfying one player, but its multiplayer where this comes into its own. Play hard or go home seems to be the motto here. Fancy shots and people potting everything without missing a shot, its a great experience, and really pushes you to become better fast.

Graphics wise, they are very nice, the best I have seen for this type of game. With some free dlc to come aswell, this will have you entertained for quite some while to come.

The Plan

The Plan is a free to play piece of art that is currently on steam, developed by Krillbite Studios.

A mere 6 minutes long, this game will make you reflect on things in your life. I felt many emotions during just the brief time I was playing this. No triple A game has ever managed to get the whole spectrum in, and I doubt that they ever will.

This game looks beautiful, and sounds fantastic. For free, I highly recommend that you play this just the once.

Game Review: Space Alert

This is one of the best games that I have ever played. And the one game that I get to play very little.

Hugely successful, the first run of this game sold out very fast, and it took what seemed an absolute age to get a reprint. I finally got my hands on a copy at the 2012 Midlands Game Expo, and boy was I excited to get it home.

The game revolves around you and the other players being dumped in a spaceship to babysit it whilst it goes out on a expedition mission. You move your un-named characters around the ship, refuelling the core, manning the guns and other things. Games last around half hour a game. The thing that sets this game apart from anything else is the way it works.

First, its a CD game. You play a CD, and each track throws different events at you. Its a cold, monotonos track, and perfectly captures the essence of deep space exploration.

Second, you have to program your characters. You get a hand of cards to begin with, and these all have different actions on them. You get a short amount of time to discuss what you need to do, and each player plays his cards. Heres the catch.. after a period of time elapses, you cannot change the order of these cards, you have to move onto another section and start again.

Thirdly, the game is quite random. Enemies and events are in decks of cards, so you never know whats goind to come next, even if you have heard the CD tracks a few times.

Photo from www.spieletest.at

You play the first round to decide what you are going to do and program your cards, then play the track again and act out how well you managed the situation. This is where friendships are broken.

So the CD tells you that a enemy has appeared, so you start to manouver around the ship to fire the guns and reload the guns. and charge the shields. The clock is ticking, and you have limited choices, and sweat begins to run. You think you are all locked in place correctly, and the round ends. Time to play this out and see if you all die a horrible death.

You reload the gun before someone fires it, but thats all wrong. You wanted to do that afterwards. You actually shoot the guns at the wrong time and miss. The person who is supposed to be recharging the shields moves the wrong way... this mission is a failure.

Yes, this game thrives on arguments. But when you get that one game where you do it all right, the elation, the high fives and hugs that happen because you survive are second to none. Grown men will cry.

And thats why we dont play this game very often. It is one of the most stressful board games ever made. Ever. But thats where the charm is, and why you need to have this game. I have not even gone into the fantastic pieces you play with, or the rule books (yes two) which are written in such a great story telling manner, these are all icing on the cake.

One of the best games ever.

 

Funny Gaming Meme's

Just a collection of the funny meme's that have made me chuckle this week.

Film review: Video Game High School

So was looking around Netflix for something interesting to watch when this caught my eye.

The story starts with our main character managing to kill one of the worlds top players on a online fps game, and he then gets invited to attend the Video Game High School, a place where people get trained in playing video games. The rest of the film revolves around making new friends, enemies, and overcoming hardships.

Originally broadcast a a web series on YouTube, made by Rocket Jump studios, it has now been put together into a 2 hour epic.

There are some big names appearing in this film, from Freddy W to Zachary Levi, and a lot of other faces that you will recognize from around the world of the internet.

Storywise, there is plenty to keep you entertained during the running time. But the thing that entertained me the most was the vision of technomogu that Rocket Jump studios have. Computers that you carry around with you, which connect to the closest screen when you want to play, to the pizza in a can from the vending machines, and even the school itself. It's apparent that a lot of money went into this movie, and was well spent aswell.

The action scenes in this film are incredible. These are shown when the characters are playing a game, mainly the fps game throughout. They really portray how a fps game would look if it was real life, with clever computer graphics and some great stunts. If there is ever a Call of Duty movie, I think that these guys should be the ones making it.



A great film, well worth the time to watch it. It will leave you wishing that the Video Game High School was actually real, and it was the school you went to.

Rocksmith Xbox 360 Review

I have had this game from the day it was released in the UK, and it was one of my most anticipated games ever. Made by Ubisoft, this is the next generation of guitar music games, and I think that the end of plastic overpriced guitar "games".

I am a avid rocker as people know, I have been playing guitar for 10 years now, spent some time in a band and as a guitar teacher. Over the past few years, I have not played as much as I would like, as life gets in the way it always seems. When Rocksmith was announced, I knew all that was going to change.

Think Rockband, but with a real, bona fide guitar, your own guitar. That is the one thing about this game that I think gives it appeal, you use the guitar you own, not a plastic fake guitar or one made specially for the game, but the one that you have practiced on, the one that you have gigged with... and thats a amazing thing to do.

The game looks ok, nothing terriably special about the visuals, but that does not matter as you will not be looking at the screen much, and all the vital info is there right away.

Songs are transcribed note for note, which means when you learn to play the song in the game, you learn it in real life. The game does up the difficulty as you go along, so a basic notation is presented first, and as you get better, the song gets harder until you are playing the full song.

The notes are presented in a Rockband esqe fasion, with notes coming down the screen. There is a graphic for each of the strings at the bottom, 6 different coloured lines, and you play the note when it reaches the string. The hardest thing for me was to learn that the fretboard underneath this moves, indicating where on the neck you need to be. This is disorientating at first, but soon becomes second nature.

There is multiplayer, but not across Xbox live. This means you need two cables and two guitars, but that should not be to hard to arrange, and brings multiplayer back to a social expericance.

A broad range of songs is on the disc, with something that should please everyone, aswell as some basic lessons on the different techniques that are employed. Extra songs can be downloaded from the store, and there are some quite difficult songs that you can get, Megadeths Symphony of Destruction and Eric Johnsons Cliffs of Dover are available, if you are so inclined, or just want a real challenge.

Overall this is a great game if you do play the guitar already, but also a great way to get into playing guitar if you don't. I would however recommend getting some professional guitar lessons aswell as this game, to stop you from gaining bad habits, and to teach you the proper position for you hands to go in.


It is a difficult game to begin with. Stick with it, and you will soon be rocking out to a wide range of songs, and hopefully this game will create a whole new wave of bedroom rockers that will go on to create some truly great music.

A must buy game.

Available now on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Vintage Game: Blockbusters

A game based on the popular UK television show from the 80's. Adorned with a picture of Bob Holness in a blazing, and I must say very sharp white suit, what is this game actually like?

Made by Waddingtons and designed for three players. The white team has only one player, but has less spaces to travel across the board and goes first. Blue team has two people, and has to travel one more space. I think most people will know how this plays. You choose a letter, and have to answer a question where the answer begins with the letter you chose. Answer correctly, and a block of your colour goes on the board and you choose another letter. Link across the board and you win.

The game pieces are very nice in this game. You get a nice 3d blockbuster board, similer to the tv show. There are a lot of questions, and a nifty holder that blocks all the answers on the card apart from the one you need, so there is no need for a dedicated question master.

This can be played with two people, just one on each side quite easily. A variation that we played was rolling a d12 to select the question that you got from the card, as sometimes you can get a run of really easy questions, and a run of really hard questions if you just read from the cards.

The only main problem with this version is that most of the questions are very dated, and will give you a mind workout, sometimes you won't even be able to answer a question due to the dating. But none the less this is a fun game with some really difficult questions, but you will surpise yourself when you know the answers.

Game review: Politika

Earlier today we decided to give this a shot, we were looking for a strategy game to play, something to get our brains warm and ticking over, and this had been hanging round for a while now, always as a possible option but overlooked.

Today however it had its chance.

Long story short, it kinda blew it,

Setup

Right out the box it needed a little set up, stickers put on pieces with little in the way of instruction as to where they went. The stickers themselves were a fair margin smaller than where they needed to go, while this makes sticking them down easy it did make the playing pieces look cheap.

Next there are then 50 tiny bits of card to split apart for each person playing, and by tiny I mean 3mm by 5mm tiny. Rather than pop the lot we picked our faction first to know which colours would be needed. We quickly found out the bits had a colour on only one side and were blank on the other, this caused issues as I picked the faction (at random) that was white meaning we were turning over little bits of card all the time to see if it was white all the way over or hiding a bit of green.

Across the top of the board is space for 3 sets of cards each with its own discard pile I could see little point for this other than bulking out the height of the board none of the cards once used are needed again.

After sorting out all the little bits of card across the landscape on the board and dishing out a few thousand dollars later (not rubles because they are apparently useless) we were ready to go.

Playing

Play proceeds in several rounds, each round has phases but with just 2 players two of the phases becomes defunct, one point of the game is to take over areas but you can faction with other players, there is little point to joining in a faction with your only opponent. Likewise with selling things you have or trading, either cards you hold or influence tokens so those were skipped.

You move your 2 play pieces around the board in to areas where your opponent has influence then attack by buying dice, and the defender gets 1 dice per influence point they have (the bits of card) and who ever has the higher roll wins (the combined score from the dice rolled), if you win you swap a bit of your card with a bit of your opponents and you slowly take over, its simple as that.

There are things around production and how you get your cash to play with but in essence its risk without the having to move armies about bit.

Ending

Play ends after 6 rounds (but you can decide on more rounds at the beginning of the game), who ever has the most little bits of card on the table wins though when we played it became obvious after about turn 3 that I would win. I had managed to get a lead (by luck not design) too great to be taken out in 3 turns even if I did nothing.

A game that looks this complex and has so many mechanics involved to play ends far too quickly to justify the set up time, even with the stickers on now and bits of card popped I think the set up is longer than it needs to be.

We are however going to give it another go in future with 3 or 4 people just to see if the factions add something

We both suspect however they won't.

Pros:

• lots of dice,
• quick half hour time waster

Cons:

• poor design of game peices
• very little strategy for a game that sells its self as strategic
• despite being dollars the paper money has Yeltsin's face on it
• generally dull

 

Board Game Review: Zombies!!!

I had been wanting to play this game for a good long time, so you can imagine my joy when someone took this to the last Thursday Night Gaming, I mean, what cooler than a board game with zombies?

Ill tell you. A good board game with zombies in it, and this is one of them. Weighing in with 14 expansions, this is a big game series, but you only need the first box to get slaying, and I would add the expansions in number order.

Lets get to the game. We played the first game with the full 6 people. The rules are simple, draw map tile and place, draw cards, play cards, move and fight, and then move the zombies. Some map tiles are empty streets, some have lots of zombies and health on them.

Everything is done with just a d6. To fight, you must roll a 4+. That’s it. If you don’t, you can spend a life to re roll the die, or spend a bullet to improve the score by one. This is actually quite strategic, do you spend all the bullets you have, or use a life and hope you roll better? If you lose all your lives, you lose half the zombies you have killed, and go back to the start.

The goal of the game is to be the one who gets to the center square of the helipad tile (somewhere in the bottom half of the deck) or be the first to kill 25 zombies. Both are no mean feat, but going for the 25 kills is the most fun (and deadly!)

Lets say this as well, this is not a co op game. You can help each other, but alliances are formed and shattered rapidly. In the game I played, one player said to me “lets work together!”, so I agreed and helped, only to be left in the middle of a zombie horde after he speeds off in a car. Nice.

The cards add a nice touch to the game, being cards that can help yourself, or severely hinder other peoples ability to survive. Such as a car card which allows you to move ten spaces, to the Zombie Master! card, that lets you place 5 zombies anywhere on the board, usually surrounding a hapless individual.

The game we played lasted around an hour and forty five minutes, and that was with 6 people, only one of which had played before. This is a great game, there is some strategy, but mainly this is a free for all romp through a zombie apocalypse where there can be only one. Get this, grab your mates, and see who can get to that helicopter first.

Railways of the World: The Card Game

It's very rare that I will play a card game that is based on another board game, but this one is different.
Railways of the World is one of my favorite board games of all time. Even so, sometimes it is just to big of a game to get out and play, especially so if you don't have enough time to play a full game. This is where the card game come in.
Played with one deck of cards, some trains and a table, this really gives you a cut down version of the game without losing anything. Players have a hand of cards, that will consist of track cards, city cards and engine cards. Track cards allow you to build between cities, city cards show how many goods are available and engine cards upgrade your engine.
There are different city cards, and the higher cities yield more goods, but less colours go into them. Track cards come in a variety of colours, and you must chain them to get the required number to get into a city. So a brown 3 city requires you to place brown track that equals or exceeds a value of 3, which you then place a control train on.
Deliveries are as normal, with you needing a engine of sufficient power to move along the links. This is where the engine cards come in. Play one, and the level of your train goes up. They can also be used as wild cards for track placement.
You start in a central hub, and build the map as you go. All the usual game rules apply from its bigger brother, and scoring is almost exactly the same.
Cards are drawn from the deck to your hand, but you can also take the top card of the discard pile aswell.
The games is great as a standalone, and if you have played the full version then it is very easy to pick up and play. But I use this game to teach people how to play the full game, and it takes just 45 mins to play, and deals with all the major rules.
All in all fantastic game which can be played multiple times in a session, with enough nuances to actually warrent getting both this and the full game. Again, as with the full game, don't let the theme put you off. Play and you will be hooked.

Card Games: What to buy?

Here's a short run down of card games that we play here at Farlands Games. We recommend all these games, if you see them, give them a go!

A pack of normal cards: Portable, and can be great fun when with a group of friends. The best thing about a pack of cards is that almost everyone knows how to play games with these. Blackjack, Poker, Chase the Ace, Go Fish, and many more. Cheap and easy, and can be played when you are waiting for people to show up for the main game. Also, there are quite a few solo games out there that use a pack of cards.

Dominion: Of course, no list of card games would be complete without a mention of this game. Simple to understand, difficult to master, and expanded with so much content, there really is something for everyone. Kids can enjoy this as much as adults, and play as hard aswell. The thing I really like about this game is how much actual strategy that there is in this, and the deeper you look into it, the better the game becomes.

Elder Sign: Ok, not technically a card game, and does use dice, but uses less table space than most card games use, and is played predominately on and with cards. The younger brother of Arkham Horror, this game plays fast, and can be played solo of with a group of friends. Plays just like Arkam Horror, with all the juicy stories and theme, but with simplified rules, plays in around 30 mins. Still cannot beat the full Arkham, but with that having a playing time of 4 hours plus, this is a fantastic alternative.

Fluxx: Simple, good, honest fun with a twisted sense of humor. Two rules start the game, and more are added as you go along. Don't like the victory conditions? Play a card to change them. Want to draw 3 cards? 4? Want to collect everyone's cards together and deal them out again? Well that's exactly what you can do with this great card game from Looney Labs. There are a number of decks available, from standard Fluxx, Pirate Fluxx and Monty Python Fluxx. All the card backs are the same, so you can mix and match between sets and create a custom game. Martian Zombies anyone?

The Island of Dr. Necreaux: James bond type hero's and villain's in a James Bond type adventure. This is a little talked about game, but can be purchased quite cheaply on the internet. Easy to understand, the difficulty in this game really is brutal however. Your mission is to save some scientists from the evil Dr. Necreaux, but he has set his island to self destruct. Battle henchmen, robots and crafty traps, save the scientists and escape, all with a time limit. So good ideas in this game, if you can find it, give it a try.

Choosing the perfect game

This was posted to our Facebook page, and I thought it was worth a post. Many thanks to the guys at Silver Oak Casino for this one.

Game Review: Railways of the World

The aim of this game is simple, build the biggest and best railway network, deliver goods and make money. The premise is simple, the game play however is as deep and strategic as you would like in a medium weight game.

Sitting in between Ticket to Ride and the 1830 series of railway games, do not let the theme put you off. It could be anything, they just chose trains.

Game contents

You get a lot of game in this big, heavy box. There are two game boards, Railways of the Eastern US, which is quite simply put, HUGE. You need a big table for this one, or the ability to bring in another table to the room. The other board, Railways if Mexico, is smaller and suited to 2-3 players. There is also a score board and income track board. Each board has their own set of cards assigned to them. You get a main rulebook, and two smaller rule sets for the individual maps. Also in the box you get paper money and bond cards, train cards, wooden goods cubes, lots of track tiles, and lots and lots of trains.

Set up is simple. Each city on the board has a number, this is the number of goods cubes that starts on it. Place cubes on all the city's. Each player each gets a level 1 train card, and a handful of train markers. 5 cards are dealt out, representing events that unfold throughout the game, and play begins. It could take a while for one person to set up alone, but with a group setup should not be more than 5 minutes.

How it plays

The game uses a auction system to gain the first turn. This can be vitally important, as if there is a card that would greatly benefit you, chances are it will greatly benefit someone else also. Bidding wars can be fierce, but great fun.

You start with no money at all in this game. Once the first auction is completed, players have to take bonds from the bank to get some money and get that game going. These bonds can never be payed back, and deduct points from you final score, 1 point for each bond you have, so you have to decide if you want to go for big money and gain a big lead, or play more reserved and see if other people will get into a lot of debt.

So now you have a little bit of money and its your turn. What to do? Well, you have 5 options.

• Build track, which costs money.
• Deliver goods, which gains you money
• Urbanize a city, change a grey city to a colour and place some good on it.
• Upgrade your train to the next level
• Take a operations card

It can be overwhelming at first, but after one turn, most players will have picked up what to do.

I'm not going to go into much detail on this game, as this review could then easily turn into a small novel. I cannot speak highly enough of this game, its almost perfect. There are just a few little niggles, like it being 1 turn to long, and some of the rules are not that clear, and you need to turn to the internet to work some problems out. But on a whole, this is like monopoly on steroids, with a good dose of strategy to boot. Plenty of options, and no two games will be the same due to the randomness of the cards and goods in play.

If you like trains, this is the game for you. If you don't like trains, then forget about the train theme, and play it. Its a economy game at heart, and a very good one at that, don't pass this one by.

Game review: Destination

When this game was put down on the table, I was under enthused to say the least. A game based on London taxi's cannot be much fun. That was where I was wrong.

The game board is a map of London with lots of roads connecting even more famous landmarks, which are destinations for your passengers. The roads all have spaces on them, which you roll for with dice like most roll and move games.

The idea of the game is to take your destination cards that you have in your hand and plan your route. When you get there, you get the fare, and lose a fuel card. Lose all your fuel cards, and you are potentially out of the game. To combat this, there is a garage that you can buy fuel from, adding a another factor into the strategy of getting from place to place.

Also included is your driving licence. If you gain 12 points on your licence, then you lose your license, and you have to pay a fine or you are out of the game.

Scattered around the board, there are traffic lights. Land on one of these, and you must take a card. There is a 50/50 chance that you will get a good card, or a bad card. Good cards give you a extra fuel, or more money, plus some more. Bad cards put points on your license, or make you pay a hefty fine for something or other.

Player interaction in this game is great, and you really have to be on the ball. If a player lands on a destination that you have in your hand, if you call it, you move to that space, they go back to the taxi rank and have to pay the fare themselves. You still use up a fuel token, so sometimes you may just want to stay quiet about this. Also, if you land on the same space as another player, you sent them back to the taxi rank. Its fun to see someone rushing somewhere, only to send them back to the beginning!

Games last about an hour, and are really fun. We played with three players, but I think with six players, this would really become some serious fun! As a fast paced, quick game this fills the ticket. We recommend this game highly.

There are many versions of this game. It is a souvenir game, made for many towns around Europe. You can get London Olympics 2012, Paris, Norwich, Birmingham and many more, even Destination Hogwarts!

Another computer game... Rocksmith

Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a board gaming blog. But there are only three computer games that I am interested and follow, one being EvE, one being Rockband, and the other is focus of this post.

I have been following Rocksmith for a while now. It is out in the USA, and due for release in Europe on September 28th.

Rocksmith is a music game, with one huge difference. It comes with a usb cable to plug into your guitar. Yes, any guitar. Whilst Rockband 3 had their Fender Squire, it was very expensive for what you got. Now with this game, you can use your own guitar that you learnt to play on. This will make the game slightly easier to play using your own guitar, but no less of a challenge.

On the disc there are some very good songs, such as The House of the Rising Sun, (I cant get no)Satisfation, Plug in Baby and Slither, and the DLC is even better. Freebird, Black Parade, Hanger 18, the list goes on and on.

By the looks of things, put this game on the hardest setting and actually learn to play the songs. So this makes this more of a game, and into the realms of a learning tool. The technology looks sound, but only time will tell if it works. I also think that the style in how you play your guitar could make or break this game, hopefully it will be able to differentiate between different fingerings of the same chord, something that Rockband could not.

Expect a full run down after September 28th, as this is one thing high on my list of things to buy.

My EvE story so far...

So I have had a while to reflect on EvE. And I must say, this is one of the best PC games that I have ever played.

So far my time has been spent mining a lot, and since I got into a retriever, my mining yield and money skyrocketed (from what it was, mining in a Catalyst..). I know I am still right at the beginning of my journey, and with less than a million skill points, even worse than what could be a noob in this game.

I see in the rookie chat a lot of people are struggling to get to grips with this game, asking questions which answers were glaringly obvious to myself. But that is the pure essence of this game, people need to ask questions to improve their experience. What is obvious to one person, is impossible to see for others. Indeed, I have asked a few questions myself, that with the responses I got, were the same questions mentioned above, but from someone else.

The people are what make this game. Most people will help you hand over fist, especially in high-sec. I have made some new online friends here, and hope to make more. There are, of course, people that just want to blow you up for fun. It happened to me, but instead of being bitter, I learn't from what had happened. Don't go into low-sec on your own in a transporter. Obvious to some, not so for others.

I have not even touched upon the PVP aspect of this game, as I have been playing this game as I would be doing in real life, and that is passively making money from mining and market manipulation. This is the best aspect of the game for me, the market.

Almost completely player driven, the market is subject to the surges of a real market. You can buy up all the available stock, and charge people a fortune to buy the basics, or you can manufacture your own goods and sell them cheaper than everyone else.

This is the type of game that I like. Strategic and quite a bit of skill needed to see the market trades that can be pulled off. I made my first 5 million ISK (the in game currency) doing just this. In the grand scheme of things, 5 million is spare change, but not bad for a 2 day old character.

There is so much to be said about this game. All I will say is this: If you like your sci-fi, and don't mind paying a monthly subscription (although, if you do get good at this game, you can use the in game currency to pay for a sub, currently around 500mil ISK) then play this game. It is such a wide reaching game, there really is something for everyone and every style of play. It is as open ended as you can get, and I hope to be playing this for many years to come.

Game Review- Bionicle Adventure Game: Quest for Makuta

This was brought round today by a friend who managed to get it cheap. So we decided to sit down and have a play through.

What struck me first was how cool this game looked. I mean, who doesn’t like Lego, Bionicle, and board games? This seemed a like it would be a great mix of the above. Looking through the rule book, this really seemed like a game that we could get our teeth into. There are various monsters, with different strengths, easy, medium and hard. There are also power ups which charge up your characters, and keys that need to be picked up. It was all looking good this far.

Next the game board. A hexagonal, jigsaw type board that is randomly generated and built as you play, each with varying amounts of monsters, exits, power ups and keys.

The goal of the game is to defeat Makuta, who's game tile will appear at some point in the game. Protecting him, there are a series of locks around the tile. Each one has a random set of keys (represented by tokens) that you need to have to get to battle him. What I like about this “boss” character is that he has varying different strengths, depending on where you come onto his board, and what number you roll on the dice.

All good so far.

The we started to play. And this game, as written, has one major flaw. Its to easy to level up. By the fourth turn of each game we played, at least one of us had a strength 30 character, and by the sixth to eighth turn, we all did. Now when the maximum strength monster is 28, (and that’s the boss), you end up just walking through the game looking for the keys and waiting for the boss tile to come out.

There is a power that allows you to steal from a character, and one power that allows you to warp anywhere on the board. But these are few and far between, and when you are powerful characters, there is just no point in using the steal, and the teleport just lets you win.

This game had so much promise from its looks, but just does not live up to it. We played as the rules say, and went back over the rules to see if there was something we missed, but there was not.

Also there are no actual Lego pieces in the box, which is not to much of a bad thing, but I feel that this could be a game that could use any theme, and the theme was pasted onto this to cash in on the Lego name.

All in all, nice pieces, bad use of mechanics. I am going to take a look to see if I can tweak the rules to give this some challenge, but I would just rather play a game that works from the box.

I need to play some better games!

Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game

People who know me will know that I am not a great fan of trading card games. I don’t like the way that you blindly pay to get cards that you probably do not want or need, or have to pay over the top to get the cards that you want.

That may all be about to change however. One of the regular TNG goers brought a few decks to play the other night, and I decided to try something different and got him to show me the ropes. From the beginning, it looked overly complicated, with cards flying from hand to table, and then decks to other decks. But after one round, it all clicked. It became very simple in premise. You play cards from your hand, either face up or face down depending on what type of card it is, and then after they have been played to the table, you play the card itself, and once its being resolved the other player takes their turn.

Now, even though it is simple in premise, there seems a lot of strategy involved, as playing a a card at the wrong time will potentially lose you the game.

I am not going to go any further with the rules of the game, as there are a lot of rules. Do not be put of by me saying that however, as the rules, one you are playing, all flow nicely and make sense. Most of the special rules are are on the cards themselves, much like the Dominion cards.

I think over the next few weeks I am going to be getting myself some starter decks and exploring this game a little bit more, as I enjoyed this game, and it may have also changed my mind on collectable card games...

Bitten by the MMORPG bug...

So my friend had been badgering me for a while to sign up for EvE online, so I decided to take up the free trial and see what it was all about.

Let me just say, I'm not a huge fan of computer games, and over the last few years has mainly been focused on Sonic and Mortal Kombat on the Xbox 360. Stepping into the online world was a odd feeling I must say, 25,000 people all playing the same game, together, was to be frank, a bit odd to me.

EvE is a massive space exploration game set in the far future. Its like a modern day Elite, with a few key differences, but there really are many many paths to glory in this game. No path to win, as its a completely open ended game. Which is something I like about RPG's, so why not a computer game?

So I delved in to EvE, and I have to say, WOW! I could not have been more wrong. It really is immersive, with great sound and graphics, and a real sandbox go anywhere do anything style of game play. I am just looking around at the moment, trying to understand how it actually works. I liken this to trying to learn the whole of the D&D core rulebook in one sitting. Confusing, but there are lots of people in the game who will help you out and point you in the right direction (as well as people who just want to blow you up, but hey, I'm just running away from them until I can fight back!)

I will write a post in the next few days, to tell you all about my impressions of this game. I am just on a trial account at the moment, and do not know yet if I shall subscribe. If the game keeps on delivering though, I may just pay for a extra month...

EvE online has just been updated with a new expansion, Inferno 1.2, and with a 14 day free trial, what’s stopping you?

Game Review: Yes! No!

The basic premise of this game: Answer the questions asked you, but you cannot answer yes or no. If you do, you lose. If you get through without saying yes no, then you win the round.

Sounds easy? It's not, especially as all the questions are obviously “yes” or “no” answers, and you cant repeat other answers, so say “maybe” twice and you lose.

This is a game not to be played sober. Neither is it a game to be played whilst drunk. Sober, its boring, and drunk, there is always someone who keeps tapping the bell, doing everyone's head in. So you take the bell away, and it becomes boring.

The only time when this would be fun I feel is after a long party, when everyone has had a lot to drink, and its just played between individual people. We have tried this as a actual get together game at the table, and it quickly got put back. Even I cannot put a silver lining in this one. Pick one up if you see it for 50p or the like, but I cannot recommend buying this new.

A short review, as there really is not a lot to say about this. Maybe if it was reworked it might play better.

Score: 3/10