Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2 and Hey, That's My Fish!

Apparently in Africa everyone has the same car...

This week, my video gaming consisted entirely of playing Far Cry 2. There’s not much more to say about that game that I haven’t mentioned in previous blogs, except that I’ve got to the second act now. As I understand it, the game is based on The Heart of Darkness; the book by Joseph Conrad that eventually became the movie Apocalypse Now. The central themes running through both of them are dehumanisation, and while a video game is necessarily removed from realistic violence, the theme is picked up here quite substantially. You’re sent to Africa to kill one man – The Jackal – but I’ve killed hundreds of people so far to get close to him, for money, information or weapons. Is the reward for killing this man worth this much death and destruction? I don’t know how the game ends, but I suspect not. From what I understand about the Far Cry games, this is a running theme: When you’ve killed enough people to escape and return home, will you be the same person you were, or will the experience have changed you entirely?

When I resolved to play a new game every week, I didn’t factor in time management, and presumed I’d have some time over the weekend that I didn’t really have as my calendar filled up. So I was set to break my New Year’s Resolution after less than one week; there just wasn’t the time! Thankfully, my girlfriend Kirsty saved it by playing a board game with me. No one said it had to be a video game!

The game we played was Fantasy Flight’s “Hey, That’s My Fish!” I wanted to collect the game and that’s the reason I own it, though I definitely had Kirsty in mind when I bought it as well. The game is about penguins stealing fish off each other, and Kirsty loves penguins. This was always going to be a winner.

"Have you ever seen
A penguin come to tea?
Take a look at me,
A penguin you will see..."

How you play: The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, arranged in lines of 7/8 to make a rough square. You place on the board your team of 2-4 penguins depending on how many people are playing. The tiles either have one, two or three fish on them, and on your turn you choose a penguin to move in a straight line towards the tile you want. After the penguin moves, you get to keep the tile you just left. You keep doing this until the penguins can’t move anymore, and whoever has the most fish at the end of the game is the winner. Kirsty and I played three games, I won the first two, but Kirsty got the hang of it after that and won the third.

This sounds like a fairly light-hearted game, but dig a little deeper and there’s a clever strategic element as well. The penguins can’t change direction during a move, nor can they move through other penguins (including their own team) or empty spaces. That means it’s entirely possible to plan moves around blocking other player’s penguins in, effectively taking them out of the game. It might seem like an unfair thing to do, but it lends a competitive element to the game, and the games rarely last long enough for one player to be eliminated entirely for more than a few minutes.

The best board games meld together their theme and mechanics well. At its core, Hey, That’s My Fish is a competitive Solitaire-like game, and as an abstract concept the game would function just as well. Slap on the theme of Penguins fighting for fish, however, and suddenly there’s a lot more at stake. It’s more fun to picture a penguin stuck on the ice, eliminated with but a single fish to eat, and the devious penguins from the other team sauntering off with armfuls of fish! Kirsty, in particular, had a good time naming the penguins Speedy, Greedy, Angry and Drunk. It’s not perfect – collecting the tiles without messing up the board can be difficult if you’re not careful, and mechanics designed around eliminating players is always a risky move – but we had a lot of fun with it and I’m looking forward to playing it with more players.