1217: Board Game Geek

I really like board games, as those of you who have been reading for a while will know. While I'm perhaps not quite as "hardcore" into the hobby as some on the Internet — largely due to not getting to play quite as often as I'd like — I do firmly count myself in that contingent of geeks who enjoy shuffling cards, fiddling with cardboard chits and moving wooden and/or plastic pieces around on a table. There's something inherently fun about it as a physical activity, and the social side of things shouldn't be understated, either — it's a great thing to do with friends if you don't feel like going out, and is an activity that can easily be "scaled" according to how many people you have and how much time you have available.

Next weekend, I'm taking a short trip away with some friends of mine to make merry and play a ton of board and card games. I'm really looking forward to it, since it will be some uninterrupted time to enjoy ourselves without having to worry about being home on time or anything like that. (I will add at this juncture that Andie is enormously understanding and patient regarding my geeky hobbies, and that I appreciate it enormously — especially when she joins in!)

Anyway, in preparation for said weekend, I catalogued the games I have available, and it seems I have amassed quite a sizeable collection over the last few years. I am happy about this, and I like displaying them as a talking point. (If you come over to our place and you see anything exciting-looking that you'd like to play on my shelf, just say the word and I'll be more than happy to bust it out.)

For those less familiar with the hobby, it's difficult to know where to start. So I thought today I'd spend a moment going over some of my favourites from "The Davison Collection" and why they're worth a look. Not all of these games hit the table regularly in our gaming group due to our varying tastes, but I enjoy all of them for various reasons.

Ticket to Ride

If you're just getting into board gaming — and by that I mean "ready to step beyond Monopoly and Scrabble" — there are few games I can recommend more than Alan R. Moon's classic Ticket to Ride. It's as simple as that.

Ticket to Ride's theme is that you are claiming train routes across North America, circa 1920. (Alternatively, in one of the many other versions of the game, you might be traversing Europe, Scandinavia or all manner of other places — each alternative version also features slightly-modified rules for variety.)

This isn't a dry, complicated business simulation, though; quite the opposite. Ticket to Ride is actually a relatively simple game of set collection. You're dealt a hand of coloured cards at the outset of the game, and on each of your turns you can do one of three things: draw two more cards, either from the selection of five face-up cards on the table, or from the face-down draw pile; claim a route by playing the corresponding number of like-coloured cards to the discard pile and scoring points for it; or drawing new "route tickets" that provide long-term challenges to be scored at the end of the game. That's essentially everything you need to know to get started — there are a couple of extra rules involving when you can and can't draw rainbow-coloured "locomotive" wild cards, but essentially those three actions are all you need to know to start playing Ticket to Ride.

Once you've got the rules down, a game of Ticket to Ride is done and dusted in maybe 30-45 minutes, depending on how many players you've got. It's a great game to introduce "non-gamers" to the hobby, and a good "start of evening" game to get everybody warmed up.

Carcassonne

Staying with the theme of "easy to understand, hard to master" games, we have Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Carcassonne, a deceptively simple yet enormously competitive game that is as fun with two players as it is with five.

There are very few rules to learn in Carcassonne. On your turn, you draw a square tile from a face-down stack, then place it somewhere on the table in such a manner that it connects to something else. Pretty much every tile connects to something, so I believe it's impossible to get into a situation where you can't play anything at all — though clever play by your opponents may mean that you might not be able to play exactly where you want to.

Points are scored in Carcassonne by completing "features" on the map. These include cities, roads and cloisters. Each of these is claimed by placing one of your little wooden "meeples" on the tile you just placed to mark your ownership of the feature, then completing it. Cities must have a complete wall; roads must terminate at junctions, cities or cloisters; cloisters must have the eight tiles surrounding them filled. You don't get your meeple back until you complete the feature, so one strategy is to make it as hard as possible for your opponents to finish their features, thereby depriving them of further point-scoring opportunities in the later game. You also can't "share" a feature with another player unless you claim an unconnected part of it and later join it up. You can add more than one meeple to a feature to defend it more strongly in the same way — you can't, however, simply add multiple meeples to connected tiles of the same feature.

Carcassonne's "long game" comes in its "farming" mechanic, the exact implementation of which depends on how old the edition you're playing is. In most current editions of the game, farms are claimed by lying a meeple down on its side in the grasslands between roads and cities. This meeple can never be reclaimed, and scores no points at the end of the game. When the game ends, each field enclosed by cities and/or roads is calculated separately — the player with the most meeples in that field scores three points per city. Again, you can't add meeples to a farm that has already been claimed except by claiming an unconnected area and later joining it up — a process which can often be quite tricky to complete.

Carcassonne has extremely simple mechanics that belie a huge amount of tactical depth. It's quick and easy to play, yet has the potential to get enormously competitive — in other words, it's a great game for board game newbies to cut their teeth on, and one that remains relevant even as you get deeper into the hobby.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a cooperative board game in which players take on the role of disease control specialists attempting to cure four viruses that are spreading across the world. Each player has unique special abilities, and a significant amount of collaboration is required to beat the challenges the game provides.

Like the other games on this list, Pandemic's mechanics are fairly simple. To cure a disease, all you have to do is collect a set of like-coloured cards, then ensure you're in a research station to discard the cards and discover a cure. The twist is that it's a bit fiddly to trade these cards between hands, and all the while you're faffing around collecting cards, the disease is continuing to spread across the world, meaning you occasionally have to prioritise charging off on an aid mission to stop the viruses spreading unchecked.

Pandemic is a challenging game. There are several ways to lose: running out of cards to draw; running out of coloured cubes to represent a disease; or allowing the number of "outbreaks" — occasions where an already heavily-infected city causes nearby cities to be struck down also — to reach its maximum. It is fairly likely that the players will lose the game, particularly when playing on the harder difficulty levels — but it is still fun despite its challenge factor.

Pandemic is a good game to encourage cooperation, communication and collaboration, and it's great for those who aren't good with super-competitive games or direct conflict. It's strictly the players against the game — unless you're playing the "bio-terrorist" mode that comes with the "On the Brink" expansion set — and thus either everyone wins together… or more likely, everyone loses together.

Whack a Catgirl

I'm not going to pretend this is the best game in the world, but it is silly and enjoyable — and not only that, it plays super-quickly, too.

In Whack a Catgirl, you are attempting to pelt an irritatingly cute anime-style catgirl with a variety of amusing objects. The basic mechanics of the game consist of drawing cards from a central face-up pool and either playing them immediately if they are an action card, or putting them in your "arsenal" in front of you if they are item cards. Once you have at least two "hearts" worth of items in front of you, you can lure Neko-chan the catgirl over to you with them — discarding them in the process — and then batter her over the head with another one or two of your items, depending on how many "hearts" you expended to lure her. Flinging items at Neko-chan allows you to discard them into your face-down score pile, which is totted up at the end of the game.

That's basically it. The game mechanics are super-simple, but the fun in Whack a Catgirl comes from the silly cards and the theme. It's fair to say that the humour and references on the cards are probably best suited to anime fans or at least those familiar with Japanese popular entertainment, but anyone can get a kick out of the amusing artwork and inherent ridiculousness of the theme.

Fun fact: this was one of the first games from Asmadi Games, who have come to somewhat greater prominence recently through their chaotic card game We Didn't Playtest This At All.

Robo Rally

This is basically Logo: The Game, a reference which was totally lost on everyone I last mentioned it to. Come on! PEN DOWN, FORWARD 100, RIGHT 90? No? I'll be over here, being an old fart.

In Robo Rally, you take on the role of one of several amusingly-named robots and must proceed through a series of checkpoints before the other robots do. Simple as that. Except it's not quite that simple — the courses are extremely hazardous, the other robots have a habit of shooting at you if you're in their firing line, and the amount of control you have over your robot can occasionally be inconveniently unpredictable.

A single turn in Robo Rally consists of drawing cards, then using them to "program" your robot's actions for the turn. Cards allow robots to move forward and backwards and turn left and right. Once everyone has programmed their robots, everyone resolves their moves one step at a time. If a robot ends a move facing another robot, it fires at it and causes damage. If a robot moves into another robot, it pushes it along — something which can seriously fuck up a carefully-laid plan.

As a robot gets more damaged, more of its cards become "locked", which means that the robot must perform that same fixed action on its turn. As you can probably imagine, this can be enormously inconvenient, particularly if it's a "move forward" card that carries a significant risk of throwing you down a pit. Further complications are added by environmental hazards such as conveyor belts, lasers, walls and all manner of other problems. What initially appears to be a simple task quickly becomes very challenging — particularly with the chaos of the other players thrown into the mix.

Robo Rally is simple to pick up but hard to master. It's a lot of fun, particularly for those who enjoy thinking about things logically, but be warned, it's pretty rare you'll be able to pull off the "perfect" plan every time!

Ascension

This is a "deckbuilding" game — a game where you start with a fixed deck of cards, shuffled randomly, and then gradually acquire more and more cards as the game progresses. These cards fall into two main categories — cards which help you buy things, and cards which help you fight things. Your points largely come around from fighting things by playing a high enough value of "fight" cards on the table — but in order to acquire said fight cards you will, of course, have to spend some time acquiring some cards that help you buy things.

Ascension's mechanics are easy to pick up and games flow quite quickly, even with four players. The deckbuilding mechanic is a lot of fun and helps ensure that games are never quite the same, and it's just thematic enough to keep fans of fighting fantasy monsters happy, while providing enough strategy for beard-scratching tactical fans to have things to think about.

Talking of deckbuilding…

Dominion

Dominion is an interesting game that has a lot of potential variations. Each time you play, you pick a random selection of card decks to use, meaning that each game has a different combination of special abilities available to you. Thematically, you're building a kingdom by purchasing territory and constructing facilities, but in practice you're collecting cards that work well together and allow you to do more with your turn than you can at the outset of the game. The basic mechanics are relatively simple, but the tactical possibilities provided by the cards mean that the game grows gradually in complexity as you collect more cards for your deck.

Dominion perhaps isn't quite as accessible as Ascension is, but it's probably the deeper game. Once you get your head around the rules and become familiar with the cards, games can flow pretty quickly — until then, however, be prepared to spend a bit of "thinking time" determining how the various cards can benefit you.

Honourable Mention: Agricola

I feel honour-bound to mention Agricola because my gaming group is such a big fan of it, but I honestly don't enjoy it all that much when it does come out. This is largely due to the fact that I'm not very good at it, which I appreciate is a somewhat shallow reason to dislike it, but there you are.

Actually, the thing I dislike more than anything about Agricola is not that I always lose at it, but it's that I don't really understand why I lose, or how I can do any better. And looking up potential strategies online doesn't really seem to help either. It's just something I need to become more familiar with, I guess. I can certainly appreciate the interesting, complex but accessible mechanics at work in the game — I just have no idea how to do any better than I already do.

Time to practice, I guess.

1214: Inner Sanctum

Mark and I played a bunch of a recently-released indie game today. That game is Coffee Stain Studios' Sanctum 2, which I purchased a copy of for Mark as a thank-you present for putting us up for the last couple of weeks, and which I was also interested in playing. I enjoyed the original game's interesting fusion of tower defense and first-person shooter mechanics as well as its distinctive presentation and excellent music, so I was actually quite interested to try the second game, and purchased a copy without a second thought.

Then the game was released, and I decided to take a peep at the Steam Community page to see what the rest of the world thought of it.

Big mistake.

It seems that Sanctum 2 is the latest victim of elitist players expecting one thing from a game and getting something slightly different, then throwing all their toys out of the pram, demanding refunds and hurling abuse at the developers. Because Sanctum 2 is not the same game as the original Sanctum, it seems, it is worthy of scorn and vilification. Because Sanctum 2 incorporates a number of features that not only make it workable on console — it's also being released on Xbox Live Arcade — but change the game balance significantly from the original, apparently it is worthy of review-bombing on Metacritic and endless, endless whining on forums.

You know what, though? I've played a good 4 or 5 hours of Sanctum 2 today in total, and it's great. It isn't the original game, no, but why would you want it to be? Sanctum is still available for download, so if you like that, go play that. Sanctum 2 is a distinctive experience that, while in possession of a couple of strange design decisions, is a lot of fun to play both solo and cooperatively with other people. It is both strategic and action-packed; challenging and fun; and it offers a significantly greater amount of content and depth than the original game did when it came out of the gates.

The complainers' biggest issues with the new game seem to be the fact that resources to build towers are now delivered as "drops" that have to be picked up manually, and that there is a hard limit of ten towers per level. The "drop" system means that everyone playing has to either agree on who is going to be in charge of building what — or charge off and race to be the first to pick up the resources. If you're playing with friends or people with whom you can communicate well, no problem. If you're playing with griefers and trolls, potential problem, but not insurmountable. (For what it's worth, I always prefer playing cooperative games with people I actually know anyway, and I'm sure I'm not the only one — and as such I probably won't run into this problem personally.)

The ten-tower limit also simply isn't an issue in practical terms. I am yet to hit said limit, because plonking down "tower base" blocks to create a maze to hold up enemies does not count towards this limit, and the limited quantity of resources on hand means that it's only really practical to build a few towers per level anyway — you have to support your towers with your own gunplay in order to succeed. It's a true hybrid, in other words; you can't win without your towers, and your towers can't win without you.

Some complainers have also whinged about the fact that you supposedly can't make complex mazes in this new game. To those people, I would invite them to have a go at the level Mark and I were playing before we wrapped up for the evening, in which we were defending two cores simultaneously from assault, and built impressive mazes on both sides of the level in order to keep the enemies away from our precious charges as long as possible. Careful tower placement and resource management was a must, and the nature of many of the enemies that came along made it necessary to cooperate, communicate and use skill and tactics to take them down rather than simply firing blindly at anything moving.

In short, Sanctum 2 is a very good game if you enjoy both first-person shooters and tower defense games that demand a slightly heavier degree of thought and strategy than normal. It's an excellent fusion of two fairly disparate game genres, and while there are a few things that could be tweaked here and there, it's perfectly enjoyable as it is. Not only that, Coffee Stain Studios have demonstrated that they are open to constructive feedback, too, and will likely continue to improve the game after its release. Given the abuse and vitriol that has been hurled their way today, they would be perfectly within their rights to just say "fuck you" to all the ungrateful gamers who are bitching about their new release, to be honest, so I have to admire them for their self-restraint in dealing with these people.

It is, essentially, yet another case of a not-insignificant number of people suffering under the assumption that Their Way is the Right Way, and that anyone who disagrees with them is somehow an awful person. These people preferred the original Sanctum to its sequel and that's absolutely fine; their behaviour towards Coffee Stain Studios and anyone who has expressed a liking for the new game is not.

1213: Another Board Game Post

Today we had another little jaunt into Toronto. Our original intention was to have a wander around Kensington Market, but by the time we got there it was so hot and sunny that it was getting not-particularly-pleasant to wander around outside, so we decided to repair to Snakes & Lattes to sit in the relative cool, play some board games and wait to meet Mark and Lynette later that afternoon.

Andie and I hit a few old favourites while we waited, including Carcassonne (which I won), Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries (which I did not win), and Blokus (which I did win). Then other people showed up, including our mutual friend Jon, who introduced us to a few interesting games I hadn't come across before.

The first of these was Fist of Dragonstones. I'd heard of this before but wasn't really familiar with it, so it was essentially new to me.

Fist of Dragonstones is a bidding game in which you're trying to be the first player to score three victory points. This might not sound like a lot, but it's not especially easy to come by points. Most of the game revolves around bidding various amounts of in-game currency (the exact amount of which you have is kept secret from the other players) in a "closed-fist" bid to acquire character cards with various special abilities. These range from dragons, which provide you with coloured dragonstones, to wizards and magicians, who help you score points from various combinations of dragonstones. Certain cards allow you to mess with the other players or hinder their efforts, but your access to the cards is limited by what money you have on hand — and there's nowhere near enough for you to be able to bid on everything.

It's an interesting game that I feel probably takes a few goes to "get" but it proved enjoyable. The dragonstones themselves are sparkly and shiny, too.

—

The "main event" for the afternoon was a game I've been curious about for a while: A Touch of Evil. This game had been sold to me as being "like Arkham Horror but a fraction of the length and a fraction of the complexity". Since I like Arkham Horror but it rarely hits the table due to the sheer amount of time it takes to play it to completion, I was very curious to try this theme-heavy game that sees you fighting various evil masterminds in Colonial America.

A Touch of Evil is indeed quite like Arkham Horror in many respects in that it encourages players to contemplate the narrative of their characters' actions rather than just following the game mechanics in a rather dry manner. There's no requirement to "role-play" or anything, but a considerable amount of enjoyment is added to the experience if you imagine or describe what the characters are getting up to and attempt to contextualise their dice rolls and skill checks.

It's also interesting in that, unlike Arkham Horror, it doesn't have to be played as a purely cooperative game. It can instead be played as a co-op-competitive game in which players split into teams to see who can be the first to take down whatever Great Evil is threatening the world this time around, or even as a "free for all" game in which all players are working individually to be the first to take down whatever Great Evil is threatening the world this time around.

There are a bunch of interesting little mechanics in A Touch of Evil that make it enjoyable, and heavily thematic. For example, the game's setting features a band of "elders" who can potentially be recruited to help out in the game's final confrontation. However, each elder has their own secret, represented by a card played under their character card. These secrets range from minor misdemeanours which don't affect the gameplay but which add some flavour to their character to the potential for them to be in league with the Great Evil — or even to be the Great Evil in disguise themselves! There's a lot of scope for surprises and hilarity, and the game never really felt like it was dragging — by the time Arkham Horror is starting to get tiresome, at least one player in A Touch of Evil is probably ready to trigger the showdown against the scenario's boss.

—

I took advantage of Snakes & Lattes' excellent prices before I left and picked up copies of Flash Point and Guild Hall to add to the copies of Smash Up and Zombie Dice I acquired the other day. Andie also bought me a copy of King of Tokyo as a belated birthday present, and I grabbed a copy of Race for the Galaxy on behalf of one of my regular board game buddies back home. I'm looking forward to trying all these games out when I get back — we have a "gaming weekend" lined up at the end of the month, so that should be a lot of fun.

Not sure what we're doing tomorrow as yet. It's possible we might have another quiet day, then we'll probably hit Toronto Zoo on our last full day here on Friday. We fly back on Saturday. It'll be sad to leave after the enjoyable time we've had here, but it'll also be nice to get back to relative "normality". I miss our rats!

1211: I Want A Place Like This

Toronto is in possession of an establishment that I very much wish was a more widespread "Thing", particularly in the U.K. Said establishment is known as Snakes & Lattes, and you can probably guess from its name what sort of place it is.

Or perhaps you can't, since it's sort of an unusual establishment.

Snakes & Lattes is a board game cafe. That is to say, it's a cafe in which the playing of board games is not only welcomed, it is actively encouraged. How, you ask? By the fact it has an impressively huge selection just sitting there on its back wall waiting to be played with, ranging from well-thumbed copies of popular card games to the hardest of the hardcore Eurogames and everything in between. It costs just $5 (plus food and drink) to hang out there for as long as you like, and that price gives you access to the establishment's impressive collection of titles as you please.

Snakes, as it tends to be known, is not just a place to go and play board games, though. It's also a great place to go and learn new board games. The staff on hand are all ready, willing and able to recommend new titles to you, and even to teach you how to play. If you're looking for a particular kind of game and you're not sure what to try, chances are someone at Snakes will be able to recommend it to you.

The other thing that Snakes is is a place to buy board games. A healthy proportion of the games that it has available for play are also available for purchase at the front of the establishment, and for very reasonable prices, too — I picked up a couple of games myself today on the recommendation of a Snakes staffer. Specifically, I grabbed a copy of Zombie Dice, which is a very simple game I've heard a few people recommend recently, and a copy of Smash Up, a very entertaining and chaotic card game that rewards being a complete dick to your opponents — I'm looking forward to introducing this one to my friends back home.

I'm certainly going to be taking at least one more trip back to Snakes before our holiday is over, since there are a number of games I've had a chance to try that I'd like to take back with me. Specifically, King of Tokyo and Flash Point are two that intrigued me a great deal — King of Tokyo for being an excellent, fun and quick game with simple but enjoyable mechanics, and Flash Point for being a great cooperative game with enough differences from Pandemic — and a similarly short play time — to be worth a look. There are also a bunch of small games that I'm keen to introduce to my friends back home, too — stuff like the color-matching card game Coloretto and the thoroughly silly Ghost Blitz and Anomia, but I haven't decided which of these, if any, I'm going to pick up my own copy of. I did also try and snag a copy of Love Letter to take home, but that game appears to be like gold dust at present.

Anyway. No idea what's on the cards for tomorrow daytime, but I believe we're going out to a comedy club tomorrow evening to see an entertaining-sounding improv and sketch show on the subject of Internet memes. There's a subject that could easily be cringeworthy, but the comedy club in question is apparently rather highly regarded in the area, and thus I'm looking forward to it quite a bit. Doubtless I will be splurging my thoughts on the matter over these pages tomorrow evening, so look forward to that then.

For now, good night!

Quick Note to PR People

Dear anyone contacting me through this site: please note that I no longer write for Inside Network (Inside Social Games/Inside Mobile Apps) — please direct any pitches for mobile and social game coverage to emanuel.maiberg@insidenetwork.com (Inside Social Games — mobile and social games) or scott.reyburn@insidenetwork.com (Inside Mobile Apps — non-game apps). Thank you!

1210: Reppin' the Squad

Those of you who know me well will probably know that Mark and Lynette, the people Andie and I are staying with on our vacation in Toronto, are members of the Squadron of Shame. The Squad is, of course, a ragtag group of gamers who came together back in the heyday of 1up.com to champion the underdogs of the games industry, and we've been doing an admirable job of that ever since through a combination of online discussion, podcasting and playing games together.

One of the reasons I've been enjoying this vacation so much is because as well as getting out and about a bit to see some of the city — something we'll be doing a lot more of in the coming week — I've had the chance to hang out with people who have very similar tastes in games to me; people who understand why JRPGs and visual novels are awesome, and why a middling-to-low Metacritic rating isn't necessarily something that should put you off playing a game if you like the look of it.

In the last week or so, we've been repping the Squad pretty well between the games we've been playing. Mark has been playing a lot of Fire Emblem on 3DS, of course, since he's been glued to it since it was released back in February, but we've been exploring some other interesting games together, too. As I type this, we're enjoying the distinctly Canadian flavour of Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, a very strange game that combines elements of tower defense, strategy games, role-playing games, action games and survival horror to create something quite unlike anything any of us have ever seen before. Meanwhile, I've completed three playthroughs each of Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart, two extremely interesting if somewhat unpolished "life sims" in which you build up stats in an attempt to complete various tasks and/or romance any of the in-game eligible bachelors and/or bachelorettes.

Sang-Froid (above) is an interesting game. At the outset, it looks like a rather ordinary third-person action game with a distinctive aesthetic, but as the levels progress it grows in complexity a bit at a time until — I assume, anyway; we haven't got that far yet — the game you're playing at the end of the story is virtually unrecognisable from the hack-and-slash it appeared to be at the very beginning. I haven't played it myself yet, but it looks like a challenging game with a huge amount of depth. The two different playable characters allow you to enjoy the game in two distinctive styles, too — one has better combat skills, making the action sequences easier, while the other is weaker, meaning that the strategic sequence where you lay traps and build structures is considerably more important to get right before the hordes of darkness come running.

But I digress. Allow me to talk about the games I have been playing personally.

I've already talked about both Long Live the Queen (above) and Spirited Heart (below) in two previous posts, but they both bear mentioning again, I think. Both games are examples of the "life sim" genre — a style of game which is rarely explored outside of low-budget indie games. I guess you could count The Sims as a life sim, but it's not quite the same thing — The Sims is a detailed simulation of social interactions and other related business, but both Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart are more like role-playing games in which you're not travelling the world in order to save humanity, but instead trying to eke out the best possible existence for your (female) protagonist.

Both Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart differ considerably, however, despite having fundamentally similar mechanics. Long Live the Queen sees you playing a predefined character — the titular Queen — and then sending her down the path of your choice, while Spirited Heart allows you a lot more freedom to design your own character and choose what your goals are, be they romancing a specific character or attempting to accomplish a mission set for you by your race's goddess. While neither of these games are particularly shiny or exciting to look at, I've found them surprisingly compelling, and they make me want to check out more games of a similar ilk.

One reason I've been enjoying them a lot is due to their similarity to an old favourite visual novel/dating sim known as True Love (above). I first played this back in probably 1999-2000 and still think of it very fondly today, despite the fact it is an absolute bugger to get running on modern machines. Like the life sims I've been playing recently, True Love saw you managing your time carefully in an attempt to build up your stats enough to attract one or more of the game's heroines and make her your "true love". I attribute my present-day love of games like the Persona series to my earlier experiences with True Love, and I'm getting a lot of the same feelings from titles like Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart, too, which is nice.

The other interesting thing about them is that these are games obviously designed with a primarily female audience in mind, and that in the case of Spirited Heart at least, they're gay/bisexual positive. Long Live the Queen doesn't have a strong romance component, whereas it's a key focus of Spirited Heart. In Spirited Heart, you even have the option to turn the girl-boy and girl-girl romances on or off independently of one another — in fact, it's sold as two separate "games" that bolt on to each other, so if you want to play an all-yuri life sim, simply pick up the Girl's Love version by itself and go nuts.

And the one final reason I'm mentioning these games is that there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of discussion about them online generally. I'm a strong believer that great games should be celebrated and appreciated as much as possible, regardless of their budget or where they hail from, and thus, well, I'm doing my bit.

You can grab Long Live the Queen from Hanako Games' website, Spirited Heart from Winter Wolves' website, and Sang-Froid from Steam.

1208: Spirited Heart

Inspired by my recent excursion into Hanako Games' Long Live The Queen, I decided to check out another "life sim" game that has been sitting in my virtual pile of shame for some time, ever since I picked up a "Manga Bundle" from Hanako and Winter Wolves a while back. Spirited Heart is a very similar sort of game to Long Live The Queen, only instead of playing as a princess-slash-queen-to-be, you're playing a "normal" person in a fantasy world. Specifically, you're playing as an 18-year old human, elf or demon woman coming to "the big city" for the first time and trying to "make it" before she turns 30. Just like real life, then.

Spirited Heart does a number of interesting things that distinguishes it from Long Live The Queen. Chief among these is the fact that you're not playing a fixed character — you're playing one of your own design, to a certain extent anyway. There isn't any option to customise your character's appearance, for example, but the way you play does determine what sort of person your character ends up as.

This starts right from the beginning of the game. Choosing a race sets your initial basic statistics, and you can then tweak this starting set of abilities by "role-playing" a few simple scenarios with multiple-choice questions. By the time you've answered these basic questions about your character's childhood and adolescence, you have a good idea of who they are and what kind of person they can be, and can start working on their statistics further.

The way the game works is that each week, you choose whether your character goes to work or takes a week off. Going to work allows you to choose any occupations you meet the prerequisite stat requirements for, while resting allows you to restore your health and morale, which can often be negatively impacted both by going to work and through random events that occur. You can't go to work if you're too unhealthy or if your morale is too low, so sometimes you need to take a week off in order to progress. Working, meanwhile, often improves your stats and allows you to earn money, which can be used on more effective vacations when required.

Occasionally during your work day, you'll have "random encounters" with the game's other characters. These visual novel-style scenes see your character interacting with these other potential love interests — both male and female (assuming you've bought both the basic heterosexual game and the standalone Girl's Love expansion) — and occasionally offer you a choice to advance your relationship.

This is probably the most interesting thing about the game: the emergent narrative created through the stat-building gameplay combines with the prescripted narrative of the visual novel-style romance scenes to create something that is much more than the sum of its parts. For example, in the game I'm currently playing, my character is a strong young woman who grew up on a farm and thus doesn't have a lot in the way of social graces. In her career so far, she has worked as a farmer and a builder. In the latter case, she encountered a young and somewhat clumsy elf noble whom it transpired she was building a house for. Somewhat later, after improving her skills enough to become a maid in a noble house, she ran into this elf maiden once again and discovered that she was betrothed to a fat, unattractive nobleman who obviously didn't give a shit about her. And thus we're into a pleasing "star-crossed lovers" sort of situation as my commoner character attempts to prove herself worthy to this noble elf maiden and her family. I don't yet know how that ends yet, but I'm curious to see.

Just to confuse matters, partway through the game, my character was visited by her Goddess and tasked with attaining a particular "title" by the time she reaches the age of 30. Unfortunately, pursuing the elf of her dreams and following the Goddess' quest are not really compatible, since the Goddess' quest requires me to become an Artist, while pursuing the elf requires me to continue working as her maid. CHOICES. DECISIONS. CONSEQUENCES.

Like Long Live The Queen, Spirited Heart is a fairly no-frills production with minimal graphics, animation and sound, but like Long Live The Queen, it's also a surprisingly compelling game if you take it in the spirit in which it is intended. It's a role-playing game in which you're not battling monsters or going on epic quests; you're living a (relatively) normal life in a fantasy world and trying to make the best of your situation. It's an interesting little game, and one which I see myself playing through a few times.

Find out more here.

1205: Long Live the Queen

A short while back, a few indie developers that I enjoy the work of very much released a bundle of games that looked interesting. Among this selection of games was a title known as Long Live the Queen by Hanako Games, developer of Magical Diary, a game which I enjoyed very much. I picked up the bundle and, as tends to happen frequently with this sort of thing, forgot all about it completely until recently.

The specific circumstances which caused me to remember the existence of Long Live the Queen as a Thing were catching a glimpse of it on Steam Greenlight earlier. The premise of taking a young anime girl, dressing her up and then watching her die horribly sounded appealing and interesting, so I decided to check the game out for myself.

What I discovered was a very interesting "life sim"/strategy game with a surprising amount of hidden depth. Since Hanako Games is a small developer with only a couple of people to its name — creator Georgina Bensley and one or two others — it's a game that was obviously made relatively "on the cheap," as it were, with relatively little in the way of graphics and sound/music, but that doesn't stop it from being very interesting indeed.

Essentially, Long Live the Queen is a game somewhat akin to old Japanese games like Princess Maker, in that you have a young anime girl to take care of and must train her up to deal with various situations appropriately. The course which the game's plot takes depends on the skills which you choose to train up, and the skills which you can train most effectively are determined by Our Heroine's current mood — for example, if she's depressed, she's particularly wont to express herself through things like music and singing, whereas if she's angry, she can channel her aggression into training in things like military strategy and proper use of weapons. Training to particular levels in things unlocks various costumes appropriate to the skills she's learning — for example, learning a lot of spiritual skills unlocks a priestess outfit, while becoming a "Lumen" and awakening to her family's magical heritage unlocks a particularly awesome "magical girl" outfit.

These skills aren't just for bragging rights, though. Each in-game "week" sees various events happening, many of which require a skill check to successfully resolve. Failing the skill check isn't necessarily a bad result, though — it simply means that Our Heroine doesn't have the requisite skills to resolve a situation in a particular way. For example, early in the game, she's sent a necklace by a Duke who is proposing marriage to her, but having a distinct lack of knowledge of the way things work in the royal court means that she doesn't recognise the gift for what it is and instead responds with a rather unqueenly "Oooh! Sparkly!" — but it cheers her up.

Making it through the game without dying horribly is a case of carefully making decisions and levelling up skills appropriately, and it's not at all uncommon for Our Heroine to meet a sticky end — in fact, it's positively encouraged via the "collect them all!" death checklist in the game's main menu. It's almost preferable to play the game like a roguelike — starting from the beginning, only saving when you're stopping playing rather than before you make a critical decision, and dealing with the consequences of your actions. In a nice touch, reaching the end of a game — whether with Our Heroine's coronation as Queen or with her death — allows you to export a complete log file of everything that happened so you can perhaps figure out what on Earth went wrong.

In short, it's a very interesting game, and well worth checking out. Don't go into it expecting something spectacular — the music loops are nice, but very short and repetitive, and there's not a lot of variation in the graphics (though Our Heroine's various costumes are all great) — and you'll have a great time building your own custom princess and seeing how she survives in the world.

Find out more here.

1203: Back to the Mansion Again

I played a bit more Luigi's Mansion 2 earlier. Haven't played it a lot yet, but I'm really liking it for a number of different reasons.

Firstly, the single-player mode has a very strong "adventure game" feel about it. Specifically, it features frequent occurrences of getting "stuck" — something which is not altogether common in modern games that hold your hand quite a lot. Luigi's Mansion, though, despite appearing quite tutorial-heavy in the first couple of levels, very quickly turns into a game where you're expected to work things out for yourself, to remember things from earlier and to explore thoroughly rather than just following the handy glowing trail of breadcrumbs on the map.

Secondly, the multiplayer mode is awesome. It hadn't occurred to me that multiplayer in Luigi's Mansion 2 might actually be good, but by golly, it really, really is. I've only tried the "Hunters" mode in Download Play so far — this apparently means it's a "limited" form of the full multiplayer experience — but it was a blast by itself.

Essentially, the multiplayer mode is a cooperative ghost hunt for up to four players at once. Before starting the game, the players choose how many floors of a mansion they want to tackle and must then clear each of them against a strict time limit. Each level is randomly generated, requiring methodical exploration to locate where all the ghosts are and then to take them down. Communication between players is also helpful, but for those who don't want to actually talk to each other — or those who are unable to due to playing online, for example — there's a handy little "quick chat" thingy on the D-pad, allowing you to make Luigi say various things, but more importantly, display a callout on the map indicating that the other players' attention is required in a specific location.

It's a really interesting mode because it's simple but extremely flexible. If you want a short game, you can play just 5 floors. If you want a longer game, you can play up to 25 floors, and successfully clearing this opens up an "Endless" mode, which sounds like a lot of fun. Within the individual play session, players earn points towards upgrades that are valid just for their single play session, making a single multiplayer game feel like a microcosm of the main game's upgrade and reward structure. It's really, really neat and I can actually see myself playing it quite a bit.

The Download Play functionality also reminds me of one of the great unsung features of Nintendo's handhelds. It is absolutely awesome to be able to wirelessly beam a limited version of a game over to your friends and play them without them having to own the game. Wireless multiplayer on its own is great — remember the awkwardness of hooking up link cables? — but when your friends don't have to have their own copy of the game? Brilliant. The only thing about this that I hate is the fact that the 3DS' stupid region locking prevents handhelds from different regions downloading these multiplayer-specific packages. Sometimes. (If it was consistent, I might not be quite so mad about it, but still.)

Anyway. Luigi's Mansion continues to be an entertaining experience, and I'm looking forward to investigating it further. For now, however, I bid you good night!

1202: Say Anything

We're in Canada! Also quite jetlagged. Andie flaked out pretty early and went to bed, but I powered on through and played a bunch of board and card games before being introduced to Adventure Time (hilarious) and Polar Bear Cafe (also hilarious, but in a completely different way).

We played a few games this evening, including Love Letter, Magical Athlete and Say Anything. All of them are pleasantly lightweight, quick games that can easily be slotted in to an evening, and they're also particularly friendly to casual players or inexperienced gamers.

Love Letter is an exercise in simplicity. Each of the players are a prospective suitor to the princess, and they're trying to get their love letter into her hands. The card they have in their hand at any one time represents who has their letter at any given time, and the numerical rank on the card represents how "close" to the princess the love letter is. When the deck — which is made up of just 16 cards — is exhausted or all players except one have been eliminated, the surviving player with the highest-ranked card is declared the winner of that round. Play then repeats until someone has won four rounds.

The interesting part of Love Letter comes in the special effects all the cards have. Each turn, you draw a second card, and you must then "play" one of your two cards by discarding it. Discarding any card causes its effect to occur, and these range from swapping hands with other people to being able to peek at their cards or potentially eliminate them from the current round. As you might expect, the princess card is the strongest if you survive to the end of the game, but if somehow you find yourself having to discard it, you're immediately eliminated.

It's a very simple game that is easy to understand, and there's a surprising amount of hidden depth to it — card-counting, bluffing and working out the best way to pull the wool over the other players' eyes.

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Magical Athlete, meanwhile, was described to me as "Snakes and Ladders with special powers", and that's a fairly apt description. The game unfolds in two phases — firstly, each player must assemble a team of five magical athletes, each of whom have their own special abilities, and secondly, everyone then has to compete in five rounds of roll-and-move racing using a different one of their chosen characters each time. The player with the most points at the end wins.

While roll-and-move games rely heavily on luck, Magical Athlete sidesteps the experience being completely random through the aforementioned special abilities, many of which are designed to either help the owner out, hinder the others, or sometimes both. Many of the abilities are also designed to interact with one another to various degrees, which makes for some interesting encounters. By far the most memorable race we had earlier included the combination of the Siren, who pulls every other player towards her — forwards or backwards — by a single space at the start of her turn; Cupid, who moves forward five spaces any time a male and a female character occupy the same space; and the Pirate, who can "kidnap" any player and bring them back to their space. Consequently, the race became a farce: Siren constantly pulling people onto her space activated Cupid's power, which meant that Pirate would inevitably pull him back every turn.

It's a fun game — perhaps light on the strategy, but a lot of entertainment to be had here from simply observing how the different cards interact with one another.

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I think my highlight of the evening had to be Say Anything, though, which has a certain degree in common with Cards Against Humanity, only with dry-wipe markers and less filth provided up-front.

In Say Anything, players take it in turns to read one of several different questions from a card, and the other players must then scrawl an answer on their own personal whiteboard and put it in the middle of the table. The asker then picks their favourite and secretly records their choice, then everyone else bets their two coins on which one they think the asker will pick. Points are then awarded according to whether players bet on the asker's pick and various other means.

The beauty of Say Anything is that it "scales" to any type of social group — I'm not talking about difficulty or group size, but subject matter. The questions are all fairly "general" and you can literally write anything you want on your whiteboard as an answer — even if it's not "true". Like Cards Against Humanity, there's an element of playing to your "audience" when providing an answer, but unlike that game, there's no obligation to delve into depravity unless you really want to. Cards Against Humanity is as filthy as you make it to a certain extent, but there's little denying that a card that reads "Pac-Man uncontrollably guzzling cum" is anything but questionable in nature. There's nothing stopping you writing exactly the same thing in Say Anything, but equally you're not forced into the less salubrious side of things unless you want to. This means it can be played with the whole family, as opposed to Cards Against Humanity's well-deserved "mature" rating.

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I'd write more about all of these but I feel like I'm about to pass out from tiredness/jetlag. So, hello Canada, goodbye U.K. for a couple of weeks — expect updates at strange times for the next two weeks! 🙂