Archive for Games
I’ve been playing Blooms on Boardgame Arena, in an asynchronous session where we each play a couple of moves a day. I’m finding it really interesting. The designer of Blooms, Nick Bentley, describes it as “a bit like the classical game Go, but shorter, easier to learn, and more colorful.” It’s an abstract strategy game, […]
I’ve purchased an unusual number of new-to-me boardgames recently, and have now played all of them. Some notes: Colt Express Players play train robbers in the Old West. A nice mix of preprogramming moves (à la RoboRally) with a certain amount of flexibility in how you execute the moves. Competitive, not cooperative, but not as […]
Last week, Kam and I played the boardgame Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala. (We had played it before, but it was a while ago.) I more or less like it, but as we went back through the rules to re-familiarize ourselves with it, I felt like the rules just kept going on and on […]
Kam and I played our first game of Pandemic: Fall of Rome yesterday. Pretty interesting. We won fairly easily, on Introductory difficulty, and got a better sense of how the game works. Will play again. A couple of notes: It was very unclear to me from the advertising materials that the goal of the game […]
When I described the boardgame Terraforming Mars to someone a couple months back (I forget who, sorry), the first thing they asked was “What about atmospheric pressure?” I hadn’t thought of that question, but it seemed like an excellent question after they raised it. Presumably you would need to significantly increase atmospheric pressure to make […]
I posted some thoughts about playing Pandemic in a Facebook comment thread a year ago; when I came across that just now, I figured it was worth pulling those thoughts out into a post of their own. It’s possible for Pandemic to become essentially a solo game, with one experienced and/or pushy player telling everyone […]
Lately I’ve been spending way too much time playing the iOS game Hole.io. I’ve reached the point where I can consistently score 200+ points, and frequently 400+, and often get first place in a round; a couple of times, I’ve reached max size. My highest score so far is 1,601 points. So I thought it […]
I just learned that Bernie DeKoven, a.k.a. “Blue,” has died, of cancer. Bernie was my high school friend Elyon’s father. In high school and college, I had a hard time interacting with most of my friends’ parents, but Bernie was different. He was one of the leaders of the New Games movement. I had grown […]
The other day, I discovered that the only physical chess set in my house was one that doesn’t belong to me. (Not counting the Star Trek 3D chess set, which is useless for playing ordinary chess.) So I ordered a chess set online. More accurately, I ordered four of them: one with metal pieces and […]
Didn’t sleep much or well on Friday night, I think mostly because I stayed up way too late reading and playing iOS games. Hung out with Karen and Pär and Jeremiah during the day on Saturday, mostly playing Terraforming Mars, which has become one of my favorite boardgames. Then came home to help Kam move […]
Kam recently acquired the new Pandemic game, Pandemic: Rising Tide, about saving the (19th-century?) Netherlands from sea-level rise using dikes and hydraulic pumping systems. (No diseases in this one!) There are some issues with graphic design/layout of the board, but overall it’s a nice game; as with Pandemic: Iberia, it’s a good combination of familiar […]
One of my father's favorite pastimes was playing go. I posted a while back about how he tried to teach...