BoardGaming.com Makes Me Feel Foolish

Okay so BoardGaming.com is an awesome site that is currently in its beta.  If you have the time you should check it out.  While BoardGameGeek.com is the go to site for board game info, I find it an nearly unuseable eyesore needs some serious design work.  BoardGamging.com has fantastic design and some truly awesome features.  The top feature is the game overlay of the site.  You can level up for increased participation, reviews that get liked by others, providing useful tips and strategies, and other contributions to the community of the site.  It makes participation in the site fun and addictive and also means that for a beta that's been going a short time there is already a lot of really decent content to view. 

Sadly, this site has also shamed me.  I have officially written 5 reviews, 2 strategy tips, 1 general tip, and contributed to a discussion all while totally failing to update my own blog.  For some reason, writing for someone else's site lets me write casually with confidence whereas I over-anlayze my own blog posts to the point of never feeling like I have enough time to write that perfect post.  Soooo...enough of that.  I don't know if I'll actually stick to the review format I gave myself before because I don't think I really want a formal format.  I just need to get to some writing.  I've also got more free time again, so hopefully look for more on this blog. In the meantime, you can check out some of my reviews on BoardGaming.com and check out the site.  If you need an invite to get into the beta (which I believe is open until September 1st), just leave a comment with your e-mail address and I will send you an invite. 

Also, if you enjoy the site, leave a comment with your name on BoardGaming.com so I can check out your comments and reviews.

7 Wonders Game Review

I've played at least a dozen games of 7 Wonders and  I can tell you, this game is fantastic!  7 Wonders is a fast playing strategy game that lets you have all the fun of building a civilization in 30 minutes or less.  It accomplishes this by using a card drafting mechanic to determine what a player can build.  This means you will look at a handful of cards, pick one to play, then pass the rest along to the next player and look at an entirely new handful of cards.  This game is quick and fun, but might not have much staying power.  Check out the details below.

FRESHNESS

Not sure if I will ever get used to the term “Freshness”.  It makes me smile and want to smack myself.  Anyway – 7 Wonders’ use of card drafting as a build mechanic feels unlike any game I’ve ever played.  Sure the draft mechanic is stolen from Magic card tournaments, but it’s used in an entirely different way.  It’s a great fit for a building game.  It keeps the decisions strategic but the play time short.  I expect there will be many other games trying to copy and modify this drafting mechanic in the future.

INTRIGUE

This game has fantastic intrigue.  There are several different strategic paths, constant consideration from other players and the cards are lumped together differently each game so there’s always a slightly new puzzle to solve.

VARIETY

Unfortunately, here is where the game stumbles.  I loved the first dozen plays of this game, but I’m not sure how many more times I want to play it.  Remember, this game only takes 30 minutes.  That dozen or so games I played was literally three different game nights and now I’m “pacing myself” before I play it again.  While the cards are distributed differently each game, you still see the exact same cards every single time you play.  This game is in desperate need of an expansion that makes different cards available from game to game.

ELEGANCE

Elegance is this game’s strongest aspect.  7 Wonders is perfectly paced.  Three rounds of play and 6 turns to a round.  Even though there could be as many as 49 cards available in a round, you will never look at more than a hand of 7 cards in a turn and choose 1.   You always have just enough choices to consider.

FUN

While it plays quickly, 7 Wonders hits all the high points of a civilization building game.  There are build trees, military conquests, resource gathering, and trade.  It doesn’t provide the complexity and satisfaction of the more detailed civilization games, but it scratches all the right itches.  It’s also simple enough that more casual gamers could easily enjoy it.  There’s nothing about 7 Wonders that a Settlers of Catan player couldn’t handle and enjoy.

And that’s my first review in this new format.  Let me know what you think!

The 5 Factors Of Cool

Here on Cool Factor 5 I’ve decided we need a standard format for judging games. 5 things. The 5 components that all games should strive to have.

1. Freshness: Good design borrows; great design steals. All design builds on designs of the past, but great design has something that feels entirely new. Dominion caught a lot of attention because it was the first game to successfully turn deck building into a game all by itself.

2. Intrigue: A game needs a mystery to solve or a puzzle to work out. This is inherent in strategy games, but present in other games as well. Trivia games are still wildly popular because people love the sensation of figuring something out.

3. Variety: There’s an ancient Chinese proverb I just made up that says a monkey can shave a drunkard 10 times before it’s no longer funny. Games lose their luster if you see the same stuff every time. Magic the Gathering, king of collectible card games, offers near limitless variety.

4. Elegance: I don’t mean it dances well and looks pretty in a dress, though bonus points if it does. Elegance in design is about using a little to do a lot. Great depth in a simple to understand package. It takes 10 minutes to learn the rules of Chess and a lifetime to master it.

5. Fun: Like the old line about pornography, fun is hard to define but you know it when you see it. Fun is personal. It’s the spark that makes you smile. Despite a rather dull and uninteresting set of rules, Monopoly has survived the ages because it taps in to the fun of being rich.

So there they are, the 5 factors of cool. You’ll note they make a snappy pneumonic acronym FIVE F. True, I had to use the slightly “dude that’s awesome” surfer term of “freshness” to make it happen, but “originality” would have made the acronym FIVE O and I am not the game police. These are the categories I will be using to tell you about games in the future and whether or not those games measure up to something worth playing. Let me know what ya think.

Next time on Cool Factor 5: The game 7 Wonders and how it holds up to the Five Factors.

Welcome To The Re-Launch!

Back after a very long hiatus due to the birth of my son and needing to get my family re-oriented with its new size and structure. Turns out babies are cute...but mean. My son like to repeatedly fight me to a knock out.

But no more! I have found a moment to myself. I am re-launching this blog with a brand new approach. Henceforth, this blog will be a place for three things.

1. Reviewing Games: This is not new to the blog but I will be having a more standard format by which I judge games.

2. Displaying new and exciting things about the games I’m designing: I’ll share bits about the games I’m working on and the occasional freebees of alternate or additional rules for games you might be playing.

3. Game theory and game design concepts: I’m sure you’ve got games you like, but do you know what exactly makes you like them? By better understanding the inner workings of games, it can be easier to pick out ones you’ll like or create fun house rules to improve the games you already own.

I’ll give details on each of those soon. I’ve got updates on games I’ve played and games I’m working on designing. So here it is, the new blog, the new look, and the new approach. Let me know what you think!

Next time on Cool Factor 5: The 5 Factors of Cool. The standards by which I judge all games, the ones I play and the ones I design.

Bring Back The Spice

Randomness and Unpredictability in RPG Characters

Role-Playing Games have greatly refined their mechanics over the years. There has been a noticeable trend towards increasingly well-balanced rules that give the players complete control over what type of characters they make and how those characters end up. This trend, taken to its furthest extent, might help ensure that no player gets an unfairly powerful character, but it also ensures that no character will really have anything all that unique.

Big Daddy
Nowhere has this trend been stronger than in the most popular RPG of all, Dungeons and Dragons. In 2nd edition, there were many campaign worlds that included random tables in character creation. Darksun gave everyone random psionic powers. Birthright did something similar with blood powers. 3rd edition whittled most of these types of thing out. 4th edition put the nail in the coffin by taking away random die rolls for ability scores. 4th edition ensures that everything will be fair by ensuring that everything will be nearly the same.

Gamma World’s Getting There

The recently released Gamma World set does bring back some of chaos. It has a lot of randomness in its character creation and its gameplay. Randomly generated backgrounds, starting equipment, treasure, and mutant powers work together to make a game that is truly bizarre and unpredictable. Unfortunately, Gamma World is intended to be a completely absurd setting. You might be a half-cockroach, half-bird who suddenly grows 2 extra arms while fighting pig men only to have those arms fall off a few seconds later and have a horn grow out of your head. Gamma World is fun and I love it’s absurdity, but I don’t always want to play an absurd game.

Take a Chance
Characters with random stats, random powers, or other random aspects can provide so much more than mere absurdity. These tools can provide characters that have truly special qualities about them. Whether underpowered or overpowered, when you have to roll to see how a character will turn out, what you end up with is something more unique than is ever possible with the perfectly engineered hero. The pendulum has swung too far towards a very bland brand of balance. I would love to see more games bring back a little chaos and lack of control. When you take a chance and roll the dice you don’t always make something perfect, but you do make something memorable.

Miner Dig Deep: The Best Dollar In Gaming

Last week, as I was rummaging through the heap of XboxLive Indi-Games, I stumbled across a true gem. Miner Dig Deep serves an important reminder that at the end of the day fun does not take fancy tricks or impressive polygons. A simple idea, well designed shines through.



Simply Wonderful
Miner Dig Deep's simple idea is all in the name. You are a miner and your goal is to dig as deep as you can. The game sports pleasant, if simple, 2D graphics and pleasant background music that helps set a relaxing tone. The game presents the player with a single shop and save point at ground level, and then meter after meter of dirt to be dug.



The player makes all his or her own paths and, digging ever deeper, finds new ores and minerals to haul back and sell. Lamp fuel and bag space serve to limit each run into the mine. While you can always see the pathways you've dug, lamp light reveals the location of precious ore and hazardous, unbreakable rocks that you have not yet discovered. As lamp fuel is used, the aura of illumination shrinks, revealing less and less. Eventually, you find yourself digging blindly, unsure of where the next hazard awaits you. When this happens, or when your bag is so full of treasure you can hold no more, it's time to ascend to the surface, sell all your loot and buy new equipment and upgrades.

Perfect Rhythm
Miner Dig Deep hits all the right beats. Every time the game encourages you to come up for air, you will undoubtedly have enough money to buy or upgrade your tools in some useful way. Almost every time you head back into the mine it is with a new toy to try out. The penalty for getting stuck or killed in the mine is simply being warped back to the top without any of the ore gained on your recent trip.

The only part that some players might find tedious is the trip back to the bottom of the mine to continue digging. As the mine gets hundred of meters deep, this can start to feel a little tedious. There are teleporters placed at various levels to warp you safely back to the surface, but you cannot warp back down. At first, I found this a bit frustrating. However, I realized that if the player could just warp back to the lowest point it would make the entire mine above irrelevant. Put in this perspective, the trip down became just another part of the game, and I found enjoyment in digging new paths to help make the descent faster. Additionally, you descend past previous mined areas with more lamp fuel at your disposal and often see ore that you missed before.

Bang For A Buck
Miner Dig Deep has an ending, but only after you've dug well past 1000 meters deep. My first play through took me almost 6 hours after which the game let me start a new mine will all my advanced tools. I had a blast as I dug all the way to the bottom again in 15 minutes. The mine is randomly generated each time, so I find myself tempted to start a proper new game and build a new mine from scratch all over again.

All this fun can be had for only 80 Microsoft Points ($1.00). I'm sure many people have at least that many points laying around as left over from prior purchases. I cannot remember the last time I was this entertained for so little money. Buy this game. You won't regret it.


If you do buy it, leave a comment and let me know how you liked it. Also, for a review of another game that presents simple fun, check out my friends at Growing Up Gamers as their 5 year old daughter reviews Sonic Colors for the Wii.

Gaming Disappointments: Final Fantasy Series

But First, A Quick Note About 4th Edition D&D…

Originally, for my greatest disappointments in gaming I was going to tackle D&D 4th Edition. However, my good friend Randy at Growing Up Gamers beat me to the punch. So, I will say just these few words on it.

4th edition D&D strips away just about everything that encourages role-playing and storytelling. It reverts years of D&D evolution back to something much closer to its roots as a miniatures battle game with the thin veneer of story. If all you want from D&D is a vehicle for playing classic fantasy archetypes who dungeon delve and hack up monsters, then I think 4th edition will serve you just fine. However, if you’re love of D&D stems from the love of experiencing heroic stories with unique characters where battles occur (but are not the entire point) then the 4th edition rules will lend you no assistance. True, intriguing stories and wonderful characters can be invented with no rules help at all. That doesn’t give Wizard of the Coast (makers of D&D 4th edition) a pass for removing all the customizable flourishes and non-combat abilities of class and character that helped D&D stories come vibrantly to life.

And Now…Final Fantasy

The original Final Fantasy was actually little more than a D&D adventure. The classes, the monsters, the spells and even some of the items were ripped straight from the pages of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. In the years that followed, Final Fantasy grew past its D&D roots to find its own voice and its own wonderful style. It then went on to lose its damn mind and exchanged its soul (and its gameplay) all in the name of pretty graphics.

It’s Hallowed Roots

As the Final Fantasy games continued, the series became known for its wonderful characters, interesting stories, and vibrant worlds. The actual gameplay was beloved by many for its sense of exploration, enjoyable character advancement, and epic scale. The story path was amazing, but off the story path you could find hidden spells, new creatures to summon, powerful weapons and helpful accessories. The only real complaint most fans of the series would volley is that at some point the combat in Final Fantasy became repetitive and was reduced to little more than mashing a single button to make everyone attack, win, and grind up a few more levels before a big boss fight.

The Beginning of the End

The hints of Final Fantasy’s doom came even during its peak days on the Playstation. Final Fantasy 7 had long, unskippable summon spells that were incredible to watch the first time and tedious to endure the 20th time you wanted to cast you powerful spell. With the move to Playstation 2, Square released Final Fantasy X…that last good Final Fantasy ever made. With X, there was a big sign that the series was going off the rails. It was the first time where you had no overworld map to explore and when you finally got your own airship, it was nothing more than a map where you could pick points to warp to and check out.

Check Points On The Way To Fail

From Final Fantasy X you’ve got a series of terrible mistakes.

Final Fantasy the Spirits Within: Cutscene hubris leads the company to release a theatrical length cutscene that is devoid of anything resembling Final Fantasy, but sure does look pretty.

Final Fantasy X -2: Harping their first ever direct sequel, Square releases a game that has nothing to do with its beloved predecessor. It has a nearly linear, mission based structure with dress-up Barbie outfits as the main form of customization.

Final Fantasy XII: Square decides to solve the tedious, button mashing combat by letting the player do tedious combat that requires no thinking or button pressing at all. The game still has some sense of exploration, but once again the overworld is absent and there is no real airship.

Final Fantasy XIII – The Big Fail

All of Final Fantasy’s blundering attempts to find a way to update its style and stay cool, culminated in an epic fail called Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy XIII does accomplish one amazing feat. It makes the combat fun again. Which is good, because combat is all you will be doing. Gone is the exploration. Gone is any semblance of interesting treasure or locales. Instead, the game consists of running down a narrow corridor with no real twists or turns and fighting monsters. Then you fight a boss and watch a cutscene or two. Rinse and repeat for 30 hours of game. I hear it opens up eventually, but that's about 30 hours too late for me.

Final Fantasy has fallen from one of my favorite RPG series, to one of my least favorite RPG's of all time. Sadly, I can only hope that Square Enix can find a way to get Final Fantasy back on track...or at least give it a proper burial.

Attack or Defend

Please leave a comment with your own complaints or defense of Final Fantasy or 4th ed D&D. Or feel free to share some of you own great disappointments in gaming. Maybe a good cry will help us all feel better.