Archive for Games
This year’s Hugo ballot has a (one-year-only) Best Video Game category. I had heard of (but not played) most of the nominated games, but was curious about one in particular that I had never heard of: Blaseball. Turns out that it’s a free, web-based “absurdist […] take on fantasy baseball,” in which you bet imaginary […]
I’ve acquired a ridiculous number of boardgames lately—eight of them in the past three weeks. (I bought 11 boardgames in all of last year, and most of those were near the end of the year.) Which I’m calling ridiculous partly because I’ve run out of space on my boardgames bookcase, but mostly because I’m unlikely […]
This started out as a Facebook comment about my history with story/plot in RPGs, in response to a discussion between Ben and Kel in comments on a post of Mary Anne’s; but it got long and sort of morphed into a broad overview of my history with RPGs. (In this post, I’m using the term […]
Flash Player will stop working at the end of the year. (It’s already been shut down in some browsers.) So if you want to revisit any old-favorite Flash games, now’s the time. For example, there’s the lovely flOw, made by (at least some of?) the same people who made Journey and Sky and Flower. Microbes […]
It turns out that it’s possible, and fun, to play various kinds of games on a video call (such as Zoom or Google Meet). Note: In this post, I’m talking about games to play with friends and family. The topic of playing games online with randomly chosen strangers is a different thing, and not something […]
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 […]