Kaz

I almost stole Chrono Trigger. 

Well.Not literally, but figurative stealing is still a crime I suppose.

Let me backtrack. I was a Genesis supporter, stalwartly so. As much as I regret it today, I never owned an SNES. Which I now surmise is the greatest crime a self-proclaimed video game enthusiast can commit. If you didn’t play SNES games back in the day your weren’t playing the best.

It’s not as if I never played on an SNES. I did partake of my friends’ systems at times. But this precluded me from playing any RPGs back in the day (with the exception of Super Mario RPG, which my closest childhood friend and I completed in a 36 hour marathon one weekend). 

This means, however, that I missed out on playing one of the classics: Chrono Trigger. An experience I was determined to obtain later in life (read: high school) through the burgeoning mass of emulators at the time.But Chrono Trigger contained a portion of gameplay that required fancy graphics interpretation the emulators of the time were incapable of, which prevented me from progressing past the early stages of the game.

Luckily in my junior year at high school I managed to borrow a friend’s PSone (he had just bought a PS2) and got to play the PS version of Trigger, choppy opening anime and all. So for about a week straight,  while my friend was enjoying GTAIII on his brand new PS2 I was enjoying the 16bit splendor of Squaresoft’s masterpiece on his now defunct PSone.

So in the end I happily chugged through the ages legally, albeit through borrowing and not purchase, but the disconnect in never having the SNES version I’ve managed to steel my will and refuse the Square-Tax on the new Chrono Trigger DS.

 For now. 

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As of late, some members of The Rumble Pack crew have become hopeless addicts. No I’m not talking about The Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. I’m talking about our obsession with games that harken back to simpler times–before pixelshaders, bumpmapping and poly-counts.

We have become boardgamers.

Which is, like, at least a couplesteps above LARPers.

For me board games have been bred into me. I’m sure my DNA resembles Backgammon more than a helical. In fact, I recall fondly finding a stash of my families old dusty board games in the hallway closet as a kid. I remember my dad teaching me how to play Stratego, Backgammon and Risk. And the few memories of my grandfather that I have almost always involved teaching me Chess (which was more of a brutal beat down than “teaching”).

 Since board gaming has become all the rage again where I live I thought I’d take some time to present the cool finds that we’ve been making here in my blog. Maybe you’ll give them a chance if you’re so inclined.

Without further adieu:

Puerto Rico (2002, Andreas Seyfarth)

I picked up this game upon the recommendation of the site: BoardGameGeek (this site also had the pictures of the game I’m using here to illustrate what it looks like). Not that it’s the hot new title out there (it is almost 6 years old) but many on that site claimed that it stands the test of time. It also was very different from the other style of games that we had been playing so the combination of the two factors made it a very easy purchase.

I’ve only played one game so far but I liked what I saw in that game. After only a couple of rounds of play everyone at the table (Tony and Tom were playing) seemed to get the basic rules and we all developed our own simple strategies. Which is the sign of a deep game; our strategies were formed as very inexperienced players, yet none of them dominated and none floundered (except when Tom kept getting screwed early in the game). It seems that the game is setup up for many plays with varying strategies.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a plantation owner on the burgeoning island of Puerto Rico, you need to out ship or trade your rivals to get the most amount of goods back to the Old World. In gameplay elements: you need to collect and manage colonists, plantations, buildings to create goods (of five different types) to ship away for victory points. The total amount of victory points you have the game end is your score, and, clearly, the person with the most wins the game.

Here’s the basic setup of the game to give you an idea of the components you get:

The main feature of the game that (at the time it was released) was incredibly innovative was the turn selection mechanic. There are 8 roles (in a 5 player game) that players choose to take different actions, choosing starts with the player who has the governor card (determined by die roll at game start) and goes around the table, until all players have a role at which point the three leftover roles get a doubloon (the game’s currency) which the next player to choose them gets, the roles are returned to the central pot and the governor cards moves to the next player in clockwise order and the turn starts again. When a role is selected all players get to take the action associated with it, but the player that selected the role gets a bonus for doing so. In effect, each round lets you take 5 actions total, one of which has a bonus since you picked it.

The roles let you build buildings or expand your plantation or get more colonists and so on. Each round is a balance of guessing what your opponents will select and determining which role advances your position relative to your opponents. The best part of the game and the most strategic is that when you select a role you must consider that everyone benefits from the choice, everyone gets the action, you have to choose when to take roles that help you the most.

Here’s what your board will look like in the middle of the game:

So we all went about making our little empires of goods. And everyone had a different strategy going. Tom started the game and took a quarry; which provides discounts to building so he immediately set out to fill his city with buildings. Jard ended up with a hybrid strategy of building and trading the most expensive good: Coffee. Tony, as when we play Settlers of Catan, went for a monopoly. In this case a sugar monopoly, or sug-opoly. I set out to maximize the goods I could send back to the Old World, focusing on three goods (corn, sugar and tobacco) and producing them in bulk. My girlfriend tried to obtain a way to make one of each good providing variety for trading and shipping.

Each strategy had clear benefits but at least for me I noticed flaws. I felt cash starved through the early game, and in the late game both my girlfriend and Tony had a cash surplus. Ultimate my girlfriend tied in victory points with me but won based on the tiebreaker of cash and goods. But the best part of the game was the varied strategies and tactics made the game very close. The total point spread was 49 for last place and 53s for first and second. A tight game indeed.

Based on the fact that I can’t wait to play again (maybe I can con people into it tonight) in the face of an overwhelming amount of video games I want to get to makes me assuredly recommend this game to anyone interested in getting a board game. If you don’t think board games are your cup of tea, then I’d recommend lighter fair. My only pre-game recommendation is to read the rulebook’s description of each building, the tiles that you get don’t have a full enough description to go by. In fact, this fact made Tom’s buy buildings till you drop strategy very difficult and confusing.

Otherwise:

I give Puerto Rico a 5-full-trading-ships out of 5…uh…not full trading ships?

 Oh, just get the game already!

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I’ve been meaning to have a boring weekend for the past month or so. I had been meaning to stay at my apartment as much as possible, do as little as possible and sleep as best I could (it gets harder once you start working full time, strange, I know). This weekend, with a veritable glut of board games, card games and video games in tow, I embarked on a wonderful journey of self-discovery: I rediscovered how much my ass enjoys couches.

I’ve just picked up a full copy of Carcassonne–several expansions to go along with it as well–and enjoyed the simple pleasure of organizing all the tiles, and meticulously punching them from their cardboard womb. I also snagged a 6 player copy of the seminal German board game Settlers of Catan, which easily transforms into the delightful drinking game “Drunkards of Catan” which was made more delightful when it easily came the closest to being the first board game to list as a cause of death on a birth certificate. I finally have my own version of Munchkin to trick people into playing and got to try some two player rounds of Chez Geek.

But the nerdery didn’t stop there.

I’ve been plugging away at Dead Space, Fable II and Little Big Planet. Dead Space was stopped, well, dead in it’s tracks around the end of chapter 2 mostly at the fault of Fable and LBP. I’ll be picking up where I left off and finishing that game, in fact, I made a pact with Tom that neither of us would take Fallout3 out of the shrink wrap until Dead Space was vanquished. The fear being that neither would return to such a wonderful game in the face of such a massive RPG (plus we both loved the original Fallouts).

I’d expected Little Big Planet to dominate not only my attention, but due to it’s easy to use tools, I expected my girlfriend would love to bounce through the levels with me.

Ironically I found a surprisingly different result. I spent a lot of Saturday in Albion, I was motoring through the story when my girlfriend arrived in the late afternoon. She watched for a while and asked if I had tried co-op yet. I was kind of amazed she was offering to try.

To understand my amazement you have to understand her gaming preferences. She likes The Sims, Time Crisis, Guitar Hero/Rock Band. She plays Starcraft and will play Unreal Tournament, but ultimately doesn’t care too much about action or RPG type games (except for her passing fascination with attempting to play WoW). I would hazard that she represents more average gamers than anyone on the podcast.

So I was shocked that a seemingly hardcore fantasy RPG would make her want to play. So shocked that I assumed she only wanted to play merely to participate in my obsession, doing something with me would be more interesting than watching my slave away as a lumberjack by my lonesome, even if the game wasn’t up her alley. As we played, though, a transformation occurred. She started to care that the gold she earned could be going to her own character. We went so far as to have her play through the childhood opening to have her very own hero to play.

As the night when on she commented on how she liked the game–that the game didn’t intimidate her, that it felt easy to get the hang of combat. Then she divulged that when I wasn’t around she could see firing up the Xbox to play through her character and hoped I would tag along with her, to return her favor. An interesting development to be sure.

So I was happy to see Adam Sessler’s latest “Sessler’s Soapbox” was devoted to how Fable II is a great starter game to get people interested in RPGs. I knew a game like LBP or music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero could capture her attention. I was just shocked that there was such a phenomenon with Fable and that other people had noticed too!

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More to come on this:

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