Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Age of Empires, Hey! That's My Fish, Sushi Go

The key to First Edition Pathfinder
is to attack something that isn't the
player character's hit points...

I’ll start this week by mentioning something I forgot to tell you about last week: Pathfinder. A weekg ago I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group, and we had a really good time. We’re quite high-level now, I think they’re all at level 11 which is high for a game that in all other times I’ve played it had been wrapped up long before we got to this sort of tier. The group had a fine time defeating The Scribbler, who had in the previous section managed to turn some of the group on each other and using their abilities to circumnavigate certain areas of the dungeon. “Forbiddance” spell denying you access to a certain room? No problem – burrow underneath it by having your Druid turn into an Earth Elemental and have the whole thing collapse out of the affected area. They also managed to dispatch an Ancient White Dragon with relative ease, although that probably has more to do with Ian’s Alchemist’s ability to fly onto his back and drop bombs on the dragon from above. There’s still a long way to go before we get to the end of this, but the other lads seem determined to see it through to the end! 

Not managed anything this huge yet...

I also had a go with a game that I downloaded on Chirstmas Day, according to my Steam records: Age of Empires. I owned this game a long time ago, but it appears to have been updated to run on modern computers and was a pleasure to play again. It’s a real-time strategy game that focuses on the pre-industrial eras of civilization, where society starts of as hunter-gatherers and ends up with huge armies taking over the world, or at least the parts of Central Europe we were familiar with at that point. I’ve played up to the end of the Egyptian campaign, which is more of a tutorial than anything else that introduces you to the game mechanics and win conditions. It’s been a great ride so far; I’ve enjoyed building up my armies, figuring out what I need to do to win and making the right moves at the right time – even if that generally involves turning it into a war of attrition, and waiting for the enemies to use up all of their resources before making my move! I usually enjoy strategy games and this one is no exception.

I also managed to play a couple of games with Kirsty: The first was our old favourite, Hey! That’s My Fish, where we battled our penguins for control of as many fish as possible. Known for its brutal simplicity and surprisingly competitive mechanics, we’re starting to get our heads around this game as we’re constantly watching each other’s penguins and our own, judging what would be the best move to make. I won, but it was close this time with only about five points in it!

A pleasure to play
after all this time!

The other game was a game I’d owned for a while and hadn’t got around to playing, which was Sushi Go. I bought this game for the third time at the UK Games Expo in 2017. The first time, I’d bought the game off Ebay – but it only had the cards, not the instructions, and I didn’t know how to play it at that point, so that was no use. The second time, I’d ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived it turned out to be printed in Polish and Czech; I can read neither. I found it for sale with one of the stall holders at the Expo, who told me that this wasn’t uncommon; the bar code is the same whatever language it is printed in and the guys picking the list aren’t too careful about what they’re picking and for who! It is a “pick and pass” card game that’s supposed to represent a conveyer belt of sushi, where you pick the best card from the ones you’re given and pass the remaining cards around. With two players, it’s an interesting challenge, since you’ve got a decent idea of what will be coming when you pass the cards – it’s easier to plan a strategy! A fun game, in all.

Last Week's Games: Aracania, 8-Bit Armies, Assassin's Creed 2, Trivial Pursuit, Codenames, Labyrinth, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Hey! That's My Fish

As I’ve been off on Christmas Holidays for the last couple of weeks, I’ve had more than the usual amount of time to play games! There’s been quite a few of them so I’ll be brief:

At least the guy begins the game equipped for his
supposed profession - shepherd.

On the PS4, I’ve been playing Arcania. This is a grim dark western Role-Playing Game, of little surprise to anybody familiar with The Witcher or the Elder Scrolls. This has been a mixed bag for me so far. There are some major flaws in the game, not the least of them that the cut scenes don’t work. I thought this was deliberate when I first booted the game and started playing as a King in the middle of a nightmare, then woke up a few minutes later as some rustic pretty boy whose name I don’t know and had no greater aspirations than to perform a few fetch quests and marry his sweetie-pie. But then, after going through what I presume was the magic tutorial in which I defeated a giant beetle-like monster, the game jumped straight to the adventure being on a different island altogether, a malevolent force (of Paladins?) having apparently invaded your home and killed everybody there. I didn’t see any of this. Also, by the standards of what I expect from roleplaying games, Arcania is very basic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it sustains under its own weight, but people who play these types of games may be expecting a little more. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I may see it through to the end!

On my laptop I’ve been mainly playing 8-Bit Armies. I beat another couple of missions on the Renegade faction. I like that the game is structured in this way, because it gives me a definite start-stop mentality; I can play it for a bit and then stop without necessarily having to carry on for ages. With a sometimes very busy schedule, this can be a blessing indeed!

The Ultimate Faffing About Franchise!

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2. I started this a couple of years ago and didn’t get very far. This was during the time where I was trying to play one new game every week; AC2 was my new game for that week but I don’t seem to have played it much beyond the first couple of hours. I wasn’t far off beating the first Assassin’s Creed game at that point and perhaps I was a little “Assassin’s Creed”ed out to put much time in to it’s sequel, but I’m enjoying it now. It’s a good game, hopefully I’ll see it through to the end as well!

Finally, we had a few Board Games! At Fran’s birthday party, we played a mixture of Harry Potter and Friends Trivial Pursuit. We didn’t have a board; we just asked each other the questions and I surprised a few people with my knowledge of Harry Potter! I didn’t even touch the Friends cards; I’m not saying I’ve never watched it, but I don’t know enough about it to be good at trivia questions. We also had a go at Codenames, which everybody likes; it’s a very simple concept – Word Association meets Spy Networks – and you can have a lot of people playing so everybody’s enjoying themselves!

I was so close! (Blue.)
But Kirsty (Red) was closer...

Later in the week we had our own games night around our flat with Fran and Phil, where we played a few games. Labyrinth is an interesting game where you must search for six treasures in a constantly shifting maze, then return to your starting block. It was a surprisingly competitive game, which Kirsty eventually won, but not before I’d embarrassed myself by playing the choral introduction to Inside by Stiltskin prior to making what I thought was the winning move – only to find out it wasn’t. We also played One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which was ok and put Fran in mind of a game she runs with her Youth Theatre group called Mafia. We rounded it off with Hey! That’s My Fish, which is an old favourite, if surprisingly competitive and is always a nice one to come back to.

I’m back at work next week, let’s see what I have time for!

 

Last Week's Games: Crossword and Thoughts on Hobby Games

Does anybody know?

Time has not been on my side this week with regard to gaming. Work, family and band commitments has meant that the time I managed to find to play games was restricted to this crossword game on my phone, which is a great little app to download and play every so often. It is sometimes quite strange that I can look at a clue for days and not know what it means, then come back to it a week later and have the meaning perfectly clear in my head!

There’s really not that much more to say about Crosswords, though, so instead of that I’m going to talk about hobby games for a bit. There’s quite a bit to say, so this blog is a little longer than usual. I’ve used the tag line on this blog a number of times, and I thought for today I would do a piece about exactly what I mean when I say hobby games:

They’re games that you usually play on a table top with a number of people, normally with some sort of tactile element to them such as cards, dice or moving pieces. And I do enjoy playing them, when I get the chance!

The first board game I can remember playing was Snakes and Ladders; still popular to this very day! While it is a very simple game in terms of its rules and structure, it’s a wonderful little way to engage with people, particularly children. My family played it a lot when I was young, and continued to do so all throughout my childhood. I have fond memories of playing Cluedo, and my brother could play Monopoly at a very early age! 

One of the few times I completed a 40K army.

Getting in to games as a hobby came about when I was thirteen and started collecting Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000. I still enjoy it to this very day, over twenty years later, although I can never escape the feeling that I’m still finding my feet with it to a large extent! I don’t paint or play games with my models anywhere near enough to develop an instinctive knowledge of the games, rules or painting techniques, but it hasn’t gone anywhere and I’ve enjoyed it on and off through most of my life. I even worked for Games Workshop at one point, although I wasn’t particularly good at that either.

But it’s been within the last ten years or so that I’ve really taken an interest in hobby games as a whole. It started with the Games Workshop games, of course, but then my mate Dave introduced me to Yu-Gi-Oh, and while collectable card games are probably the aspect of hobby games I enjoy the least, it was always fun to play with him every now and then. Around the same time I discovered Fantasy Flight games, and played some of their games over the following years before discovering other game developers and publishers. I had always wanted to find out what playing Dungeons and Dragons was like, so I bought a starter set, found a public group of people who meet every week to play Role Playing Games and got involved with that; that’s been a massive part of my social life for a long time! I also started building up a large collection of board games that, while few people seeing it for the first time have a clue what it’s all about, they do find them interesting to look at!

I always enjoy this one!

These days, I play hobby games as and when I can find the time, which currently is not often. I’m fortunate enough to have a steady roleplaying group that I meet with once a month, and I play a few games with my girlfriend and her friends now and then. I make the UK Games Expo an important date on my calendar every year! But I haven’t got the structure in my life at the moment to attend hobby shops and groups regularly. Still, the games are there if I need them!

Hobby games are in something of a “Golden Age” at the moment, where new games are coming out every month and it’s no longer the exclusive domain of unsociable nerds. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of it, and it can be quite tricky to know what I’m talking about, so I thought I’d give you a break-down of what I consider to be the four main categories, and my stake in them:

·        Board Games

·        Collectable Card Games

·        Role-Playing Games

·        War Games

It was my original intention to write it all in this blog post but I found the scope of that was too large for the format my blogs usually take, so I’m going to write them a bit at a time instead, and release them periodically. That should be a bit more interesting!

Last Week's Games: Divine Divinity, UK Games Expo 2018

I had a very enjoyable weekend at the UK Games Expo, I got to play a lot of new games and had a fantastic time. I’ll give an overview and the highlights here, but some of it will need to go in a separate blog. Even so, there’s lots to cover here, so this blog will be a little longer than usual:

Having had most of this week off work for the half-term holiday, I had time to play some video games; I cracked on with Eternal Crusade, but I played a new game as well: Divine Divinity. It’s an action-RPG in the style of Diablo. Indeed, it starts in pretty much the same way; you find yourself in a small town plagued by some misgivings from the local area, and after some initial fetch-questing, you descend into the dungeon to sort it all out.

Down in the Dungeon...

What I like about this game is that there’s no hand-holding; no easy first level, no tutorial. It’s you vs the game almost straight away, and I am fine with that. One of my pet peeves of video games is having to play it for an hour before the actual game starts. But in Divine Divinity, once you’re in the dungeon, you’re on your own. And I had a really good time; I chose the Wizard class, I managed my resources, killed enemies, got the treasure and went back to the town to take breaks when I needed to. I’ve noticed that with some RPGs, the dungeons are designed to give a sense of realism and pacing, and while the latter is crucial for a good game, sometimes the need to stop playing the game to advance the plot makes it feel somewhat artificial. While plot can add to a game, developers should never forget that the core of the game is the gameplay, and when it’s done as well as this, I could happily spend the entire game dungeon-bashing without any semblance of plot. I’ll be coming back to this one!

I make an effort to return to the UK Games Expo every year! It’s very often the highlight of my year. Here’s how it went down:

Yep, it was as rickety
as it looks...

On Friday, I had entered two tournaments: Catan and Dominion. It had been a long time since I’d played in tournament, and in previous years I felt I’d missed out on some of what the expo had to offer by avoiding them, so I signed up to play some games. I never expected to do very well, which is just as well because I didn’t, but I played seven games in a day which is more than I think I’ve ever manage in my life!. I’ll cover what I can remember of the details in a new semi-regular blog series titled Tournaments and Tribulations, but at this point I’d like to say that the atmosphere was almost the complete opposite from what I expected from tournaments. I’ve played with so-called hard-core players before, and I’ve struggled to enjoy it. I didn’t know the games very well so I expected to have a rough time, but the vast majority of people I played were very nice, patient and helpful, and that made my day as much as anything else.

Adam and Chloe - Showing me a new way
to play Hey That's My Fish

 

On Saturday I met up with some old friends from Swindon: Adam, Chloe and Tom. After going around the expo for a while we went to the gaming hall; I was happy to introduce them to Hey, That’s My Fish! We played a couple of games, and I won both of them. Chloe made an interesting observation: She suggested that we play the second game blind, with the tiles upside down. This would have been covered in playtesting, but it made a remarkable difference to the game. Without being able to call our moves based on the number of fish we’d get, we instead played a lot more aggressively, blocking each other off, and making sure we had a long run of tiles to collect when we were blocked. We also borrowed Riff Raff from Thirsty Meeples; a game in which you aim to be the first to put all of your wooden pieces of cargo on a rickety ship without them falling off – if they do, you need to catch them. Adam and Chloe won that between them. Finally, we played A Fistful of Penguins; a gambling game in which you compete for money by rolling different combinations of animals on dice, and using penguins to re-roll or add dice. I can’t remember who won those games but it was a good laugh!

A Fistful of Penguins.
Penguins are purple.

Tom stayed for Sunday and Kirsty was there as well, so we watched a couple of shows. Dark Room was excellent; John Robertson was exhausted after what must have been a long weekend for him, but his improvisation and crowd interaction was spot-on. We also saw Knightmare Live. I’ve now seen the show three times, and it was good to see some different rooms being developed. The team guiding the dungeoneers was the best I’ve ever seen it; they were from Shut Up and Sit Down. The two lead actors, however, weren’t quite as on it with their improvisation as they usually are, and I think there was a presumption that the vast majority of people had seen the show before. This blunted their usually excellent performance, but it was a very funny show nonetheless.

You can see the pattern emerging in our
preferred choice of gaming animal...

 

 

 

Earlier I’d bought Ice Cool, and Tom showed Kirsty and me how to play. It’s a really good game about flicking penguins through the halls of a school to get fish, while one penguin tries to stop them. It takes about ten minutes to play, and is meant for children, but it’s great fun and we thoroughly enjoyed it. I won the first game, and Kirsty won the other by being very good at catching our penguins!

So, a brilliant weekend, and I while my bank balance can certainly wait for the next one, I can’t! See you next year.

 

Last Week's Games: New Super Mario Bros, Diggy's Adventure, Hey, That's My Fish!

This week, I’ve been very pushed for time with work, gigs with the bands, playing video games took something of a back seat for me! But I managed to get some games in.

This happened quite a bit...

The first one was, to my surprise, New Super Mario Bros on the DS. I happened across someone who had the same game and we had a go with the multiplayer mode; Mario vs Luigi. In this, you have to collect five stars before your opponent does, using power ups and platforming to hamper your opponent any way you can. There’s a lot of fun to potentially have with this mode, however I should point out that the person I was playing against is very young and there was something of a disparity in skill level, so we didn’t play for very long!

The Dark Angels...

I continued my eternal crusade on, er, Eternal Crusade in those evenings where I had a bit of time. I’m still enjoying it, and I’m becoming a lot more familiar with the different classes now. I’m still absolutely hopeless at it, typically finishing somewhere in the bottom third of the leader board, and against players who have been playing since launch I haven’t got a chance. I’m also starting to notice the fact that there’s not really that many maps. It could do with a few more, to vary things up a bit! But on those times where I manage to sneak up behind someone and one-shot kill him, or capture a control point, or take out three guys at once (the latter happens at very infrequent intervals!) it’s really good fun, and I think this will see me through a long time yet.

With a chin to rival
Buzz Lightyear...

My new game for this week was Diggy’s Adventure on my Kindle Fire. This is a game where you have to make your way through a top-down cave by digging through collapsible squares of sand, gravel and the like. Each dig takes a certain amount of energy, and if you run out, you either need to manage your resources to make it last longer, or buy some more in micro payments! It’s competently-designed, doesn’t take itself too seriously (either that or the developer’s writing team had the week off!) and was a nice enough way to fill half an hour. But there’s not much challenge in the game that I’ve been able to see, apart from a couple of lever puzzles that are easy enough to work out. I guess later on there’d be an element of resource management in there, where you dig just far enough to achieve your objective and come back and clear the level later (the game rewards you for clearing the entire level.) There’s nothing wrong with Diggy’s quest, but like with most mobile games, I’m not sure how long it will keep me engaged.

Damn that robber!

I went in to Warlords and Wizards again and had another game of Settlers of Catan, where it got very competitive! We had to call the game early due to time allowance, but it was a pleasure to play again and I’m looking forward to the UK Championship at the UK Games Expo! I’m not expecting to do very well, but it will be interesting to play some different games with some different people. I also continued painting some Chaos Space Marines, I’ve nearly finished them now which will bring me up to 20.

Brutal but fun!

Finally, I had a few games of Hey! That’s My Fish with my Mom and my girlfriend Kirsty. It’s a really nice game to play because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, the rules take about a moment to work out (apart from working out what order to place the penguins in, I didn’t need to refer to the rules even once,) it’s really good fun and surprisingly tactical. I won the first two games and my Mom won the third. We helped her out with a move at one point near the end which turned out to be the deciding point, but as long as everybody is having a good time, it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses. I know that sounds like a very wishy-washy thing to say but it is absolutely true!

Last Week's Games: Far Cry 2, Golden Axe Warrior, Zombie Dice, Hey! That's My Fish, Forbidden Island

This week I’ve been whittling away at Far Cry 2 whenever I get the chance. I’m making slow and steady progress through the game itself, although I did manage to unlock the achievement for unlocking all of the weapons. Part of my mission for the next few times I play will be to buy them all, as well as the manuals, upgrades and ammo packs!

This is where you start...

It wasn’t going to be long before the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection found its way back in to my disc drive, and my new game for this month was Golden Axe Warrior. This is one of the unlockable games, and was previously released on the Sega Master System. It’s a top-down roleplaying game, where you play as a warrior wanting to avenge the death of his parents and destroy the evil giant Death Adder. This being an earlier iteration of an RPG, there’s very little customisation or choice of path; you need to find nine crystals in various dungeons, and the game doesn’t appear too fussy about what order you do them in, but that’s about it. It’s all about the game, wandering around the world, killing enemies, looting money off them and occasionally finding items to improve your damage or armour. There’s a weird shielding mechanic in there as well, where if you’re hit just in the right place your shield will block the shot, but I can’t use it in any dependable way yet.

I actually enjoyed the game for the hour or so that I played it, and defeated the first dungeon. It’s hardly a great-looking game after all this time, and comparisons to the Legend of Zelda are obvious and not entirely welcome (of course Sega were going to try something similar when it realised how successful these kind of games could be!) but it’s good fun and a nice way to play a bare-bones RPG without having to worry about assigning points or morality. However, this style of game was very much in its infancy at that point, and some of the systems were underdeveloped. Not having the manual to it caused me some problems, as did the option to use quest items instead of handing them in. I got a quest from an injured dwarf to bring him the Golden Apple, which is said to heal any wound. I knew perfectly well that this was true, because I’d picked up the apple and, not quite realising what it did, used it about half an hour prior to that. At that point I gave up. I’m not saying I’ll never come back to it but I didn’t want to have to play through the first hour or so of the game to correct it. Maybe another time!

Mind those red dice...

I also played some games around Kirsty’s house again the other night! We played Zombie Dice; a push-your-luck style game in which you play as a Zombie chasing survivors for their brains. You roll three dice, keep the brains, keep the shotgun blasts, and re-roll the feet of the survivors who escape. The aim of the game is to get the most brains, and the game finishes once somebody gets to 13. However, if you take three or more shotguns, you lose all the brains you collected that turn. The mechanic is risk and reward, which sometimes comes off and sometimes doesn’t; Kirsty won that one.

She also beat me at Hey, That’s My Fish, but it was a close game this time and we enjoy playing it a lot!

Finally we had a go at Forbidden Island, a game that preceded Pandemic, and when you start playing that it’s easy to see the familiar mechanics and tense races against time. You play as explorers who go to the titular Forbidden Island to look for the mythical treasure said to be hidden there. Each character has different abilities that will help, but you have limited resources, and only a short amount of time to look before the island floods and you lose. We beat the game in the end through a combination of luck and teamwork, and there’s talk of me using this game in the future as a training tool for communication!

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.