Cantaloup

Cantaloop is about a man with a mission and a nice line in snappy dialog. Returning to his home town after a spell in prison for a crime he probably didn’t commit he’s recruiting a crew to take down the villain of the piece. Your job is to help in by guiding him through a series of scenes that play like a point and click adventure game from the eighties. The game is packaged as a spiral bound book. You flick between pages using your magic viewer (actually a red filter) to find out what your actions end up doing.

The scenes are really well drawn and after a while the interaction becomes second nature. Along the way you get to have conversations with the locals which are set out as scripted scenes, allowing those playing to hone their amateur dramatic skills. We’re a way into the first book in the series and having great fun. Well worth a look if you want to spend a few hours with friends or family solving nicely made puzzles and enjoying some truly awesome puns and one-liners.

Playing Cosmic Frog

Derek and Maggy about to do something devious with their green frog..

So tonight we had our weekly games night. We played that game where you control a two mile high frog that can eat the landscape and regurgitate it. You know the one.

Or perhaps you don’t. Cosmic Frog is a game of strategy and combat that, once you get your head around the mechanism, works well. You use your frog to collect lumps of land which you then arrange in configurations that will earn you points at the end of the game. Other frogs are of course doing the same thing, and might also also decide to challenge you to a battle where you might get knocked off the board for a while and be forced to watch other players pick over your carefully curated terrain.

There are lots of special powers that you can pick up and use if you remember to reveal that you have them. And over time the landscape reduces and the game can come to quite sudden end.

The turn order is random which adds a bit of tension at the expense of you not being able to plan too much because you never know when you’ll be able to make the moves.

To me the measure of a good game is one I want to have another try at because I want to see if I can play it better next time. Cosmic Frog just about passes this test. It’s available for free on TableTop Simulator and I reckon it is worth a go if you are looking for new experiences for your game nights.

Dominion Online is awesome and free to play

Dominion is a “deck building” game. Each player starts with the same set of cards and at each turn they can use the powers on those cards to do stuff, buy new cards and hopefully a few victory points. As the turns go round you cycle through your deck which means that the you get to use the good cards you have got, along with any bad cards like curses which other players inflict upon you.

In real life this kind of game can be a bit of a pain to play, what with the constant shuffling and dealing. However, it works incredibly well on the computer and you can play with a bunch of friends straight from the browser. Just go here and sign up.

The game experience is very good. Pro tip - change the shape of your browser window so that it is taller and thinner (like above) and you can see more details of the cards you’re holding.

It’s completely free to play, it only starts to cost money if you want to buy any of the add-on card decks. And I’m not saying it’s a great game just because I won. Even though I did.

Maketober Day 20: Making Enemies with Game of Thrones

I never got round to watching the Game of Thrones TV series. But now I’ve played the board game. It was hilarious. In the game you take control one of the factions fighting for the famous “Iron Throne”. Not sure why, it doesn’t sound very comfortable. The strapline for the game is “win or die”. I was always fairly sure where I was going to end up when we started playing this evening, but I gave it a good go.

The game lets you make alliances. This is great fun. Some players tried to ally with everyone else. I allied with someone and then promptly attacked them. A move that didn’t end well for me. And I now have a reputation for treachery that will take a while to live down.

The game is all about strategy and planning, which put me at a bit of a disadvantage to be honest. But by the end I was starting to figure out how things worked. Unfortunately, by this time I was down to one footman and a single piece of land. Here are what I’m going to try and do next time we play:

• Make an alliance right at the start and make sure that it is properly mutually advantageous. The game lets you perform supporting moves for other players actions. Use these with your ally as appropriate. There are also “raiding” actions you can use to frustrate opponents moves. Use them too.

• Remember that you only need to capture a particular number of castles. This is quite easy to do without taking over the whole board. The trick is to pick the right time to ditch the ally and then go for it.

• You can use ships to move people around very quickly. Discover how to do this and then use it.

• Remember that you only have 10 moves before the game ends. So no point in playing the long game.

• Don’t forget that the hand of cards you can use to augment your battles will be restored to you once you have used them all. So don’t be afraid to take people on.

These hints come to you courtesy of a player who finished sixth out of six, but I did have a good time. If you like games like Risk, Campaign and probably poker, you will have a bit of fun with this game.

More Netgames.io fun

I’ve mentioned this site before, but I'm going to mention it again because the games are so good. We spent a very happy evening playing a variety of different things on our phones, pcs and tablets. They all worked a treat.

My Little Scythe is pie fighting fun

Over the last few weeks we’ve spent quite a few of our regular game nights playing Scythe on-line. I seem to have a love-hate relationship which Scythe. The love is directly proportional to how well the last game went. At the moment I regard not coming last as a badge of honour, and I’m working my way up from there.

My Little Scythe is stepping stone (or gateway drug if you prefer) to the “proper” game. When we played it today I spotted a lot of the gameplay elements in a much simplified form. And you don’t have battles. You have pie fights. One of the things about full fat Scythe that I find a bit annoying is that some features of the game just seem to be there to make the gameplay more complicated. There are (to me) needless interactions between game elements and lots of different ducks that you have to get precisely in a row to be able to make progress. Perhaps what I’m really saying is that I don’t have the mental horsepower and concentration to play the game properly.

My Little Scythe is much simpler and I liked it a lot. But then again, I did manage to win.

Playing Scythe

We spent the evening playing Scythe. It’s a bit complicated for me. Every time I play it I learn one thing I should do and four things I shouldn’t . Anyhoo, I’ll settle for third place. Especially if I’m playing as Nordic.

Netgames is great for, er, network games

This site is a hidden gem. For a while I was concerned about telling everyone about it on the blog in case everyone started using it and it got too busy.

Then I got real.

It is network gaming as it should be. Zero effort to create games, no crashes, no grinding of busy icons. It just works and the game implementations are spot on. And there are versions of some of our favourite games.

We tried Avalon and Codenames and they worked really well. All players need is a phone each (although it works fine via web browser on a PC too). And it is free, although they’ll take donations for a very worth cause.

Netgames.io

Mysterium is Great Fun

We’re playing a lot of online games at the moment. One of them is Mysterium. It’s a very good implementation of the board game, which is a bit like Cluedo, but with clues. One player, the ghost of the unfortunate murder victim. has the task of picking pictorial clues that match the suspected people, place and weapon. Each of the pictures that the ghost can pick has a set of elements that may, or may not, match the particular scenario assigned to each player. It builds up to a nice reveal at the end, and the artwork and presentation is suitably gothic. Worth spending a few hours with I reckon.

Scythe Board Game

There are lots of things in this world that I wish I was clever enough to do. One of them might be “Play Scythe”. It is a board game all about world (or at least board) domination. You can fight battles, make pacts, build stuff and deploy fighting machines. We watched a half hour video about it which was notable for the way that the presenter failed to take a single breath during the whole presentation. And that seemed to cover board setup and the first moves.

It was fun to play, even though we spent a lot of time wondering what the various buttons did. We were playing the online version which is very well realised. The network play was quite easy to get going and worked reliably right up to the end of the game, when for some reason we were unceremoniously dumped and the AI took over for our final two turns. Perhaps the game had lost patience with us. One thing that Scythe brings home in spades is the cost of doing battle, and the even greater cost of standing up to an incoming aggressor. We won one battle, but in doing so used up all our fighting powers, leaving us as easy pickings at what turned out to be a crucial point in the game.

We’ll be having another go, and probably watching a few more breathless videos to get more of a feel for the game.

Ticket to Ride Near Miss

We played Ticket to Ride last night. Great fun and we nearly won. Interesting fact: if you all own a copy of the original game only one of you has to buy a game variant (we played Ticket to Ride Europe) for you all to be able to play it.

Tiny Epic Galaxies Fun

We spent a happy evening playing Tiny Epic Galaxies last night. It’s a nice mix of dice and strategy. We didn’t win, but we want to play it again.

We’ve kind of got the hang of TableTop Simulator now. It’s not the same as being in the same room as the other players, but works.

Adventures in Network Gaming

We had lots of fun this evening playing games. We had six connections and eight people, and off we went. First up we tried to play Colt Express. This was hilarious. Not because it ever worked, but because our attempts to get everyone registered into a single game and signing up turned out to be at least as much fun as playing a proper game. So we moved on to Ticket to Ride, another game that we’ve enjoyed in real life. And another game that didn’t work. It’s a probably a bit cruel to berate Admodee Digital for their horrid network experience, what with all the extra traffic that they are probably seeing. But, having said that we saw just twelve people trying to play Colt Express (and six of them were us) and it still didn’t work, with “Network Error 17” being a particular favourite. In this day and age that kind of performance is rubbish. My advice: don’t pick up either of these games if you want to play them over the network.

So, around an hour in, with no games played, we moved onto Tabletopia. This is web based platform that just provides a sandboxed environment in which you play the game. And by play I mean you move all the pieces, pick your cards up and look at them, and try really hard not to put them back on the table with their faces visible.

We were playing Secret Hitler, which is a great game. After a while we managed to surmount the challenges of the virtual world and stop ourselves showing our secret roles. You can have a go for free, one player starts the game and sends out links to everyone else to join in via their browser.Although you might find that the site is very, very busy.

It was hilarious. It wasn’t quite the same experience as live play, but it was good enough to make we want to have another go.

Playing Smallworld 2 Online

Smallword is a nice little board game. Players try to build empires of different races with different attributes. The skill-full part of the game is deciding when to ditch your race, send it into decline and reset your conquering ambitions.

We played it in person a while back and tonight, because we can’t get together any more, we had a go at the online version. It worked very well, there were some network hiccups but nothing that got in the way of having fun. In fact, without the need to move bits of cardboard around and count up scores the gameplay went at a fair old clip.

If you want to play it, you can find it on Steam for a modest sum. Well worth it for the fun that we had, and we are definitely going to do it again. We used Discord for in game chatting and that worked well too.

Of course I’m only posting this because I managed to win one of the games we played…..

"Secret Hitler" is an amazing game

We spent a very happy few hours last night playing the game “Secret Hitler”. Its a role playing game where fascists (plus Hitler) take on liberals. The job of the liberals is to find out who they are and then band together and use their superior numbers to pass liberal policies. The job of the fascists is to disrupt all this and get their policies passed. If fascists get Hitler elected as chancellor they win. If the liberals get to shoot Hitler they win. The gameplay seems rather complicated when you start, but after a while the process of holding elections and passing policies gets to be second nature. Then you can get on with the lying and chicanery.

It’s not really a comment on politics. It could just as easily be Sharks vs Jets or ketchup vs mayo. However, it does set up some very interesting gameplay which kept us very engaged. If you fancy having a go you can even download and print your own copy. Well worth a look.

Playing Clank!

We had our first board game session of the year tonight. We believe in starting early. Simon came around and brought a copy of Clank! with him. It’s a deck building game where you move around a dungeon with the aim of collecting valuable artefacts and making it out alive. But make sure that you move quietly because every “clank” that you make could wake the dragon, something which never ends well. It’s great fun with lots of tension at the very end of the game as you struggle to get above ground with your hard won treasure.

Jaws board game - we're going to need a bigger boat

Another present that I got for Christmas (I must have been a really good boy last year) was the Jaws board game. At first glance it looks like something that was first released in the seventies when the movie was showing, but it turns out that it is a much more recent product.

It’s really good though.

It’s played in two acts. In the first act the human players try to locate the shark and tie it down with barrels while the shark tries to eat as many swimmers as possible. The second act switches to the ocean with the shark trying to destroy the boat and kill the crew.

It works well as a four player game, with one player taking the role of the shark and the other three the human players. However, I think it would also work really well as a two player game too. The tension builds up nicely in both acts and the end of the game was nicely balanced. We (the humans) just lost, with the shark taking out the last part of our boat just as we were getting close to seeing him off. Strongly recommended.

Bang Dice Game

We had a bunch of folks round this week and spent a while playing the “Bang!” dice game. It’s great fun. The sheriff and the deputies have to kill off the pesky outlaws before the sheriff gets shot, while the renegade just has to be the last man standing.

The dice action is fun and nicely unpredictable, although this can result in you being shot out of the game early on. The way that nobody knows who anybody is at the start of the game is fun, but it can result in deputies taking multiple hits from a sheriff who just wanted to begin the game by going “pew, pew, pew, pew” because he got the dice to do that. Worth getting.

Men at Work Board Game

Men at Work is a balancing board game. Players take it in turns to place girders, supports and workers on the building site. Place the highest piece on the site and you earn an award from Rita the site boss. Get three awards and you win the game. Make things fall down and you lose one of your three safety certificates. Lose all three and you leave the game. The pieces are beautifully made and presented, and the whole thing is nerve-wracking fun.

With most games you’re waiting for your turn so that you can do something. In Men at Work you get at least as much excitement watching other people take their turns trying to place items on precarious beams without everything falling down. Very enjoyable.

Long Cow

If it seems like I’ve been playing a few games lately I have. So there. Long Cow was an early birthday present, purchased because I liked the phrase “udderly ridiculous”, it looked like fun, and it had a “moo” voice box as one of the play pieces.

Players compete to create the longest cow and the biggest herd. Your cows can be of particular breeds, or you can use “frankencow” cards that allow you to mix them together and even add robot components. And there’s rustling and other cow related tom-foolery to be had too.

It’s actually rather fun. Nothing too taxing (although I think you can take it very seriously if you want) and some lovely artwork on the cards.