Agricola

As a board gamer, I see a lot of games set to a myriad of themes. Many times these themes include things like commerce, the political process, or even farming. While conquering the galaxy, fighting monsters, or questing for treasure might seem like the only way for a board game to be fun, most board gamers know that a great game can take a seemingly mundane theme and turn it into a marvelous board game. This is precisely what has been done with Agricola, a game where you play as a farmer and his wife as they build their farm and family.

I'm going to stop for just a second so that this can sink in. Agricola is a game about farming. You plant crops, raise livestock, have children and improve your house. This should neither be fun nor interesting for a bunch of nerdy city folk, and yet it is. More so, Agricola is an awesome game. It's definitely one of the best board games I've ever played.

The strength in Agricola lies in its replay value. In every game, each player gets a different hand of farm improvements and occupations that provide benefits. These are where players generally get the direction for their particular strategy that game. In addition, the types of actions that can be taken by the player’s changes depending on the number of players in the game, and later actions have a level of randomization to them. Finally, the before-mentioned occupations and improvements can come from one of three decks. These decks include an "easy", "complex", and "interactive" level of play with a more humorously themed X and Z deck available as well.

All of these aspects combine to make each game of Agricola truly different from the other. Beyond playing the hand that's literally dealt to you, it's even possible to eschew your cards and simply build a competitive farm without bothering to spend resources on occupations or improvements. I've not seen the kind of variety available in board game that Agricola has since Twilight Imperium. It may seem strange to compare these two wildly different games, but when you consider that both offer extremely deep replayability the comparison makes sense. Many of the actions are not even printed on the board itself, making easy to release card-only expansions that can drastically change the way the game is played. I can easily foresee playing Agricola for years to come and not getting sick of it in the least.

Agricola is a near perfect board gaming experience, getting a 10 out of 10 from me. It's challenging, great fun, and easily adaptable to any group of players.

XBox Live Arcade Round-up

Today I'm looking at my three most recent XBox Live Arcade purchases, namely Braid, Castle Crashers and Portal: Still Alive.












First up is Braid, and when I say that Braid is one of the most beautiful games that you will play I mean it. The music is fantastic, and the levels and character design are all sublime. The magic of Braid comes from combining all this visual wonder with the interesting game mechanic of time manipulation. Depending on the level, you're slowing down, reversing, or even stopping time and giving every level a new dimension. This is a phenominal game that everyone deserves to play.












Next up is Castle Crashers. Where Braid is cerebral, haute, and almost snobby Castle Crasher is good ol' beat-em-up fun. Don't get me wrong, the animations of the characters are fluid and the music is surprising compelling, but the heart of this game is simple, mindless destruction of your enemies. The leveling up of your characters and improving their strength, magic, defense, and agility adds another layer to an already awesome game. To all those kids who played Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the arcades and 7-11's, this game is for you. The game's biggest weakness is by far it's online multiplayer, which is buggy and prone to dropping games. Hopefully this will get fixed as some point. This doesn't take away from the gameplay in general nor the offline multiplayer. In fact, playing w/ 4 people in the same room is one of the games strongest points.












Finally, we have Portal: Still Alive. For starters, you must understand that this is mostly a port of the original Portal game in XBLA form. There are new, challenging achievements to be had, but aside from that and the 14 new maps, Portal: Still Alive has little else to offer. Depending on who you are, this may not be a bad thing. If you're a rabid Portal fan who owns an XBox and curses the PC crowd for having all of the extra mods and maps, this is for you. If you (for some moronic reason) haven't bought The Orange Box, this is also for you. If you have $15 with nothing better to do w/ it, this is for you. For the casual Portal fans, this isn't a good buy. I'm glad I picked this up, but I truly wish there were more maps. The price of the game is justified if you're not already an owner of the game, so the rest of us are somewhat hosed. Still, I bought it and am enjoying it all the same. The new achievements do add a new kind of challenge to the game, especially the Out of the Blue award.

In closing, Braid gets a 9 out of 10, as does Castle Crashers. These are two must-own games for your XBox Live experience. Portal gets an 6 out of 10 if you already own The Orange Box or a 10 out of 10 if you don't, mostly for being just Portal which is awesome on it's own.

D&D 4th Edition: The Barbarian: First Impressions

The original 4th Edition gave us a reimagining of some classic Dungeons and Dragons classes and in addition gave us the notion of more clearly defined party roles. I've been enjoying my time playing as a fighter in the defender role. However my character has taken a turn for the worst and now I'm in the position of creating a new character. I'm going to be going w/ an other defender (a Dragonborn Paladin), but something caught my interest while browing for ideas for my new character's build. I ran across a playtest for the upcoming Barbarian class. I was all excited, as the barbarian was one of the better tanks in 3rd. Despite their general low AC, their d12 hit dice and rage boost to CON could allow them to soak up a lot of damage while dishing out a lot of punishment.

The new barbarian is a little different. He's listed as a striker (a mobile but fragile high damage dealer), doesn't get nearly as many hit points as his 3rd edition counterpart, but gets a lot of attacks and abilities that grant temporary hit points. The only archtype available in the playtest is the offensively minded build, meaning that the more leadership inclined abilities and powers are not yet released.

Basically, the builds I'm looking at do quite a bit of damage. Unfortunately, "quite a bit of damage" doesn't go as far as it used to, and a shitty AC means that my guy will be running low on HP in a longer fight. My previous fighter had a good AC for his level, and a good amount of hit points, and still got in trouble a lot. The barbarian is supposed to be a striker, but he lacks a lot of the elusiveness that rangers and rogues seem to have. Rangers and rogues also have high DEXs, which directly contributes to a higher AC. He also lacks the ranged attacks that the warlock possess. Sure he can push someone back w/ one of his at will powers, but there's nothing stopping that same someone from walking right back up to him and clobbering the poor barbarian.

My first impressions of the class are that barbarian needs more HP overall. Right now the barbarian gets the same starting HP and HP per level as a fighter, who's generally got a higher AC. The barbarian also gets one less healing surge per day. The barbarian does get a bunch of temporary HPs from dropping people and from one of his At-Wills, but judging by how much damage we've seen dished out by non-minion monsters it's not enough to keep him in the fight for long.

I also don't care for the rage abilities to be tied to daily attack powers. That means it takes a standard action to rage, where as it was a free action before. That also means that you also get less rages over your career, with no way to get extra rages via feats. I think there should also be a lesser encounter type rage that grants a small stat boost and empowers your daily "greater" rages even more.

I'd give the barbarian 17 or 18 HP + CON score at first level, with 8 or 9 HP per level gained and 10+CON mod surges per day. His AC proficiencies are fitting with the flavor of the class, and the same goes for his lack of ranged weapon profieciencies. I'd also make his rage powers have a little more damage to them, with either a CON or CHA boost to damage. Despite being a striker, he's going to be on the front line getting the crap beat out of him. He needs more HP.

I look forward to playing him, but I don't expect him to last more than a session or two. I've not decided between a human or dwarf, and a gensai barbarian seems like it'd be pretty sweet.

Speaking of barbarians...

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects

I imagine that most board gamers are like me and played with a lot of toys when they were kids. At some point, most of us give up playing with bits of plastic and move on to more intelligent pursuits. Some of us, still hold on to toys and while we don't play with them anymore we keep them around. They have their place on our desks and mantles, and we imagine their exploits and battles in our heads. This is why games like Warhammer, Twilight Imperium, and Battletech are so cool. They fire up our imaginations as we play out the battles in our minds, with minatures and terrain helping us play.

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects offers a similar kind of stimulation. The game has a lot of essential plastic bits and even the game's box is a part of the set up. In the game, the players take on the role of architects building a palace for the eponymous Egyptian queen. In order to complete the various parts of the building, such as the garden mosaics, throne, honorary obilisks, and sphinxes. As more elements of the palace are completed, Cleopatra approaches the front doors. Once she reaches the doors, the game ends and a winner is determined by the number of point accumulated by complete parts of the palace.

There's a catch though, and this part truly makes the game stand out. Since all the players are competing for the attention of the great Cleopatra, there are shortcuts the players can take to complete their projects before their rivals. Shady workers and specialists and ill-gotten goods speed up the completion of the palace, but at the cost of corruption at the hands of the crocodile-god Sobek. At the end of the game, the player with the most corruption loses. No reprieves, no appeals. The player with the most corruption comes in last place. Everyone else is judged on the points they've recieved over the course of the game.

Cleopatra is mechanically similar to other building games like Ticket to Ride in that every turn you must choose whether to gather resources or build. The key differnce here are the pieces, which are awesome. Some players have even taken to adding custom paintjobs to their bits. For this, the 1 hour or so play time, and the rather nasty-but-fun corruption mechanic, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects get a 7/10 VP. I'd say the only bad thing about game is putting it away, which can be somewhat of a hassle, BECAUSE OF ALL THE AWESOME PIECES. :D

Railroad Tycoon

Computer games made into board games may seem like an unnecessary step backwards in the evolution of gaming. Computers, and by extention robots, are capable of keeping track of the minutae of a game such as dice rolls, modifiers, range and so forth, leaving the player with the burden of directing his overall strategy and having more fun. Did I mention how awesome robots are? It saddens me that I can't have an army of robots vacuuming my carpet, mowing my lawn and doing the busy work around the kitchen. Robots, and by extention computers, have no feelings and are generally unsociable folk. This is where board gaming wins, with the joy of human contact and the imperfection of not remembering that you did get a +2 from flanking and actually did drop that goblin.



So how does one take an established and excellent computer game and make it into a board game that fun to play yet deep enough to excerise your brain? Well in the case of Railroad Tycoon, you take an established and excellent board game (Age of Steam), tart it up with new plastic bits and pieces, put in all on a HUGE board with a load of new art, and viola you've got Railroad Tycoon: The Board Game. Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair. Yes, Age of Steam is a great game but it's also pretty minimal in terms of art and bits. RT:tBG addresses that in spades, and did I mention the FUCKING HUGE board? Seriously, it's like it's own acrage. Twilight Imperium doesn't take up that much space. Huge.



The gameplay is just like Age of Steam. Players are the eponymous tycoons of the railroad, building connections between cities while delivering goods to gain income to make more connections that build into the end game. Victory is determined by the income you're bringing in, not necessarily cash in hand. You periodically have to put yourself in debt by issuing shares to gain capital to build your railroad.





So we've essentially got Age of Steam with better art, on a big ol' board. It's not really fair to say that RT:tBG is any better than AoS as far as game play, because it's pretty much the same except on a bigger field. Simply put if you like AoS, than you'll like Railroad Tycoon as long as you have the room for it. Both games rate a 8/10, as the bigger better art of Railroad Tycoon is cancelled out by the near logistical nightmare that entails getting this game on the table. The FUCKING HUGE table.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Part 1

Player-killing. Wanna a song about it? Like to hear it? Here it goes...

Over the weekend, our gaming group got together to try out the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure. I'll just say that so far this module is quite brutal. I'm not sure that I've got anything good to compare it to, as I'm not personally familiar with anal penatration but it's pretty harsh. An ill-timed fight with one of the adventures mini-bosses ended with a total party kill, forcing us to make a whole new set of characters. This was after our original 1st level party of a human wizard, dragonborn paladin, dwarf cleric, and halfling rogue lost it's before-mentioned paladin (he was replaced by a human fighter). Even though we probably could have won the battle with the goblin brute mini-boss if we'd rested and recovered our daily powers, it would've still been an uphill battle. Our next iteration of the party was comprised of a tiefling warlord, eladrin wizard, half-elf warlock, elf ranger, and half-elf paladin. This very pointy party made easier work of the brute and his remaining lackies, despite his nasty damage output and 106 (!) HP. We've now learned that these fiends are in league with a cult that wishes to reopen a rift that could flood the world with Orcus' undead hordes. At this point we called it a session and we'll be finishing up the module over the next couple of weeks.

Overall, I'm enjoying the module and the new rule revision so far. The bloodbath of PCs has actually been pretty educational, as we've now seen all of the PC races and classes in action. So far, my impressions are:

• 1st level guys are a lot more interesting, especially the wizard and cleric. In 3rd Edition, a 1st level wizard with an 18 INT had 3 1st level spells per day, or 4 if they were a specialist. A 1st level cleric with an 18 WIS had 4 1st levels spells as well. Both classes also had 3 0-level spells that were mostly useless. In 4th Edition, a cleric or wizard has at least 2 powers that he can use as often as he wants that are just as good as most 1st levels spells with the exception of magic missle, grease (which is sadly absent) and possibly Summon Monster 1. Both classes, as well as all other PC classes, also have a power that renews with each encounter and a power that renews every day. This gives every single class a depth at first level that's a lot of fun and very interesting. This isn't new information, as the preview material listed the power advancement for the classes. Playing is believing, and I'm now a fan of this whole new power scheme. Mostly.
• While the lower levels are interesting, I can't help but think that at higher levels there won't be the same kind of variety. This is especially true of the classic spellcasting classes of cleric and wizard. Even martial adepts from The Book of Nine Swords have more maneuvers than any of the 4th Edition PC classes, and those maneuvers are more easily recovered and reused, even for swordsages.
• I'm still not entirely convinced that a party can go without a cleric. We'll soon see as my Warlord tries to fill the leader role in the new party. Even so, it looks like while it's not essential to have a leader providing additional healing in a fights, it's still pretty fucking important. Second winds and healing surges are nice, but it's still something that most characters can only do once in a fight. A paladin seems to help in a pinch, but that's still a more limited resource than a 3rd edition cleric that can turn nearly all of his spells into a cure spell of some sort. The jury's still out on this.
• More to the point of healing and hit points, everyone has more of them. I mean they really have a lot MOAR of them. As I mentioned before, the goblin brute mini-boss had over 100, while my first level wizard had 29 HP. The only "people" that seemed to have gotten the short end of the HP stick are the minion-typed monsters, who each have a single hit point while retaining OK defenses and damage output. While this makes wading through mooks more succinct and easier for the DM to track, it's made up for by all the other monsters types having just as many or more hit points than the PCs which can make for some very grindy fights. The damage output of the PCs is somewhat higher than before to make up for this, especially from rogues and rangers. Still, it can make for a somewhat prolonged fight when it gets down to the last few guys in an encounter.
• All of the skill mechanics are simplier and more streamlined, even relating to social encounters. This seems to give the DM a lot more latitude in using these skills as he sees fit. Gone are the days when you can just waste skill points on that Profession: Sous Chef or Perform: Bass Accordian. Now the skill catagories are more broad and seemingly more useful to both the DM and the PCs.

Well, that's it for now. More later, and a final review of the module when we finish it.

Battle Line

Two player games don't get a lot of notice from me. It's probably because I love the dynamics that come with having a group of people play a game. It started with Magic: The Gathering where I hated dualing, but loved building and using decks designed for multiplayer as it was much more interesting for me. These days the only two-player games that I partake of are the occasional games of Mastermind or the bedtime-frolicking with the girl, which has all of the negotiations, pain, thrill, heart-break, area-denial, and victory conditions of the best board games around. Yes, I just compared my married love life to a fucking board game. Blow me. :D

Then comes along Battle Line, a card game for two players that has a theme rooted in ancient warfare. The game has a Troop deck with cards numbered 1 to 10 in 6 colors or suites. Additionally there's also a rule-breaking Tactics deck that sees limited but powerful use. There are nine flags that represent the eponymous battle line. Players in turn play up to three cards in those areas in order to try and get essentially a better 3-card poker hand than their opponent. If a player can prove that their hand cannot be beaten, excepting the intervention of Tactics cards, that player claims the flag. The game is over when a player takes any five of the nine flags or when a player takes three adjacent flags, which represents an overrun in that section of the line.

The games theme, the types of soliders printed on the cards from lowly pikemen to mighty war elephants, is awesome. The game actually plays pretty fast (depending on the players of course) and the endgame is wrought with game-breaking decision. Frankly the games only problem is that it's almost too short. This is easily remedied by playing a best of 3, 5, 7, etc game series. At $20, it's well worth it for any size gaming group.

Battle line gets a 10 of 10 VP from me. The game is just about perfect and deserves a spot in everybody's gaming library.