The New Obsession on the Block
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!
1 commentGate Way Drug
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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Autocross
This is the last car blog for a while, but it’s a doozy. Next summer when the gaming drought hits I won’t be sad at all. Because summer is when the autocross season starts. Basically I’ll let the pictures do the talking, but I have to say at the outset that if you have a decent auto or know a friend who does makes sure you try going around an autocross course or a road track at some point in your life. You’ll realize just how little you know about driving.
First of all, here are the two courses I ran at my first event (I went to another one since).
As is custom at the autocross club I went two, they run a technical course in the morning, then modify it to make it faster and run it backwards in the afternoon. When I showed up in the much talked about turbo Cobalt, expectations were high. Many people had read articles about how fast the car went around the Nurburgring and VIR. In fact, as I rolled into the pit I could hear people talking about the car.
“Did you hear about what cars that beat at VIR in…” they would say. Which was a great feeling, considering I had the cheapest car of the bunch. My class consisted of two BMWs and a Mazda MazdaSpeed3, to give you an idea of the caliber of cars there, let alone the fully modded 350Zs, Corvette Z06s and numerous Miatas.
I got a couple pics of the car from a photographer who takes shots of the competitors. Sadly, no one came with me, so I didn’t have someone looking for my car in particular. Luckily, the club is very welcoming and the guys with cameras make sure to get pictures of everything.
Yes, I have a printout attached to the side of my car instead of real numbers, and a big goofy R to point out that I was a novice. I ended up being ranked in the D-Stock Class instead of the rookie class, which was good for the rookies, as I pointed out on the podcast I might have had an edge on them from my “experience”.
The next event I returned with magnetic numbers in tow.
It’s important to not a couple things here: 1. No “R” on my car anymore, 2. I’m coming out of a hard left hander here, notice the chassis is level and all four wheels are down, 3. You can tell it’s out of a left handed corner because there are pointer cones on their side (I didn’t knock those over). Not shown in picture above: my big goofy-ass smile.
So what have I learned autocrossing?
Well, that it was a ton of fun. That I have a lot to learn…
And that it will shred your tires if you drive as hard as I do. Maybe I need some race rubber…
No commentsObsessive Behavior
I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but having a lateral g-meter in your car and driving on public roads is like giving a kid a firecracker and telling them not to set it off on days that end in “y”. I’ve spent many of my lunch breaks trying to find twisty roads nearby to really test out the car and have been keeping a leaderboard of sorts of my maximum lateral g pulled.
It’s a little blurry (the iPhone has a decent camera but lacks the ability to take a macro shot), but that’s my new record: 0.88g. It was a hell of a right hander, marked 10mph with a yellow sign that I may or may not have completely ignored. The car is rated to .91g on a flat surface, but on a track or regular roads that pitch with the turn it’s capable of upwards of 1.3g, which is faster than falling, but sideways so it’s much more frightening.
In case anyone was curious where my gage sits, I realize I never actually showed where it hides. And because everyone I’ve sent this picture asks: no, I don’t live on a farm!
Occasionally, smart people do dumb things. (Ironically, the dumb thing here is driving while taking a picture. Those who drive stick and are keen of eye will notice I’m doing 39mph in 4th gear, which is a pretty gentle speed.)
Edit: I think I have to worry about getting too much attention even in my car…
The big wing has already brought several ricer flybys down upon me. “Silly WRX”, I chuckled, “you aren’t an STi…”
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