Xbox Workers Threaten Suicide in China

It doesn't seem like the most effective way to keep your job, but the subtleties of Chinese labor negotiations are lost on my Western Imperialist mind.

Dozens of workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over job transfers that was defused but highlights growing labor unrest as China's economy slows.

The dispute was set off after contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group announced it would close the assembly line for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 models at its plant in the central city of Wuhan and transfer the workers to other jobs, workers and Foxconn said Thursday.

Also of note: the writing at Associated Press (and, frankly, all mainstream journalism) just keeps getting worse and worse. I wrote better than this for my high-school newspaper: "The site previously had a couple of suicides or attempted ones a couple years back, prompting the government to take over the operations of the dormitories, said Wang, the equipment engineer."

ToneMatrix: Your Amazing Time-Waster of the Day

The developer describes ToneMatrix as a "simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute." It's the work of Andre Michelle, and it's flat-out amazing in its addictive simplicity. If he converts this to a mobile app, he'll make a pot of money.

I found this one courtesy of my National Catholic Register colleague Simcha Fisher, the irritant who helps little grains of sand become wondrous pearls, whether we want to or not.

Strange Stories of an Accused Spy

Amir Hekmati

On Monday, January 9th, Iran's Revolutionary Court found 29-year-old Amir Hekmati "Corrupt on Earth and Mohareb,” and sentenced him to death as a US spy. (“Mohareb” is legal term identifying a defendant as someone who is waging war against God, or God and the State.) The verdict against Hekmati, a US citizen, is creating an international incident, but the story Hekmati tells in his “confession” is a strange tale of the CIA using games to influence popular opinion.

Amir Hekmati was born in Arizona to Iranian parents, and graduated from high school in Michigan. In his confession, he claims to have entered the US military in 2001, where he was trained and deployed as an interpreter because of his familiarity with the Farsi language. The US military regularly uses Iranian-Americans as translators in Afghanistan because Farsi is spoken in both countries.

After serving in Iraq for several months (the confession claims), Hekmati went to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is a super-secret group that is described, on their publicly-available website, as being established in 1958 “to prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting U.S. national security and create strategic surprise for U.S. adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the U.S. military.” DARPA is, essentially, a high-tech R&D contractor for the US Department of Defense.

Now, here’s where things get weird. In the interest of just reporting the facts as stated, this is what Hekmati said in a confession broadcast on Iranian state television and obtained, we are certain, without any coercion, threats, or use physical force:

“After DARPA, I was recruited by Kuma Games Company, a computer games company which received money from CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the US does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable. The head of Kuma called me and said I have received your resume from DARPA, and we have a program in which you can help us. It [Kuma] was also a cover for the CIA and only the chief of company knows that you're working with the agency.”

Hekmati’s father, Ali, a professor of microbiology at Mitt College in Flint, Michigan, contradicts this version of events. He told the UK Telegraph that his son was in Iran visiting his grandparents. "He is not a spy. It's a whole bunch of lies on my good son. They have lied about any American ... captured in Iran for visiting or tourism, or for any other reason. The first two weeks went without incident. The third week in Tehran, some people visited him and took him away. Nobody heard from him in the next three months."

Kuma Reality Games was founded in 2004, and is based in New York. They are best known for a series of poorly-regarded downloadable military first-person shooters, often with a “ripped from the headlines” premise. Users can download new episodes containing missions such as the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. They’re also responsible for Dinohunters, a game of almost sublime awfulness. One of their few innovations is the use of sponsored advertising in free games.

Some of Kuma’s shooters may well be intended for the military, which often uses software for recruitment and training purposes. In 2006, Keith Halper, the head of Kuma, admitted to Kotaku.com that Kuma created training simulations for the US Army.

Dionohunters (Kuma Games) was created by the CIA
to convince Iranians that the US has an elite force of
dinosaurs on flying scooters equipped with machine guns.

Kuma also releases a steady stream of machinima, which are short films created using game engines. Some of these are just silly or promotional, while others depict military operations. The tone of the military shooters is sober and undeniably pro-American, with coalition soldiers shown taking down terrorist targets or conducting important military operations. It’s not particularly hard to see it as a coordinated propaganda effort, but it’s also not hard to see it as yet another military shooter with a Western/American point of view. Aside from its use of contemporary missions, nothing about Kuma’s work stands out one way or another.

The uniquely peculiar part about the “trial” of Hekmati is that the main charge against him was not for his work—real or not—with Kuma, but for working in Iran as a CIA spy. He was allegedly ordered to give Iranian Intelligence good information in order to get their trust, and then to start providing them with misinformation. He was allegedly captured before he could begin this alleged mission.

Of course, this version of events would ask us to believe that Hekmati’s employment at a company producing widely-available pro-American propaganda was merely cover for his role as a CIA agent, which would be a rather curious way of approaching a covert operation.

Although Iranian death sentences are usually carried out quickly and brutally, it’s more likely than Hekmati will be kept alive and used as a pawn in the ongoing geopolitical struggle between Iran and the West. 

Written for Games Magazine

Wizards of the Coast to Revamp D&D Yet Again

An interesting email just popped into my box, and I was thinking about headlining it "Wizards of the Coast Prepairing to Break D&D and Blame You."  All I have to say to WotC is this: D&D 4.0 is just fine, Encounters is a great initiative, the boardgames are good, and Pathfinder is out there for anyone who still wants the 3.5 experience. For the love of God, please STOP!

I mean, how many people would really prefer to go back to 3.5 via Pathfinder? Let's just toddle over to Amazon and take a look at the sales charts to see what people are buying  ...

... well ...

... that was awkward.

The release Wizards sent to the press today is after this-here jump:

Yeaaaah! Skyrim Gets a Little Macho Magic

I was going to title this one, "Snap Into a Skyrim," but Kotaku beat me to it. A Skyrim mod in which dragons are replaced with the late, great pro wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage? Yeah, that's awesome.

REVIEW: Skyrim

I've reviewed Skyrim twice and written two editorials about it, and still keep on playing, logging something like 90 hours or so in total. That may seem like a ridiculous commitment for a game, but remember that a long-running TV show (like Lost, the last thing I followed with any enthusiasm) runs about 100 hours, and Skyrim is every bit as rich and varied as Lost. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is vast. It is epic. It achieves moments of grandeur unlike anything I have encountered in three decades of roleplaying, both conventional and electronic. Yes, it is flawed in places, but these are the flaws of a system that occasionally breaks down under the immense strain created by pushing current technology to its very limits.

Players familiar with its immediate predecessors from Bethesda Softworks—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3—will see much that is familiar, on the surface. This is a still an open-world, action-oriented RPG, heavy on dialog and filled with quests, places to go and things to kill.

But everything is simply better this time around. The potential hinted at in Oblivion and developed further in Fallout 3 is now fully manifested in Skyrim. Bethesda has created a dynamic, highly-developed fantasy world populated with an immensely diverse selection of characters and spread across the most fully realized landscape ever seen in an electronic game.

There is much to love in Skyrim, but the biggest star of the show isn’t the graphics, the story, the character, or even the gameplay, but Skyrim itself. This world just cries out for exploration, from its sunlit valleys to its frozen mountain peeks, from the depths of monster-haunted dungeons to the frozen plains where peaceful giants (deadly if provoked) act as shepherds for wooly mammoths. Farms, homesteads, fortresses, and ancient ruins dot the landscape, beckoning travelers. The different cities each have a unique character and even a socioeconomic profile, from grand imperial seats to squalid, poverty-blighted areas where thieves and cutthroats lurk in shadows. Never has a fantasy world been so thoroughly and appealingly realized in a video or computer game, not even World of Warcraft.

Within this world, the NPCs (non-player characters) go about their lives in a more dynamic way that we’ve ever seen, farming, trading, crafting, stealing, drinking, brawling, flirting, and just living out their lives. It’s hard to tell just how dynamic the economic model really is, but there’s no question that the fortunes of people and locations fluctuate with time and the actions of the player. Driving off a threat helps a town or city return to normal, and people’s actions and moods change accordingly.

Skyrim is not a true sequel to Oblivion, but a new series set in the same world. The action picks up 200 years after the end of Oblivion. The Empire has begun to recede, and with the assassination of the High King of the Skyrim region, the area is slowly descending into chaos and civil war. The natives of Skyrim, known as the Nords, are divided into various camps: those who want to remain in the Empire, those who want out, those who want to manipulate either side for power, and those who just want to keep their heads down and avoid trouble.

You begin the game by choosing a race and appearance for your character. This doesn’t effect the plotline of the game, but it does effect interactions with individual characters. The world of Skyrim is highly race-conscious, with xenophobia leading to inevitable conflict. Whatever race you choose, you start the game as a prisoner on his way to execution, suspected of being a member of the rebel group known as the Stormcloaks. The execution is interrupted by the shocking reappearance of dragons, which had long since vanished from the land.

From there, you learn that you are yourself “Dragonborn,” meaning you are able to speak the “language” of dragons. Known as “shouts,” this dragon language enables you to harness incredible power, but also marks you as someone destined to play a major role in the fate of Skyrim. Soon, you find yourself meeting a wide array of people and factions, each with their own needs and agendas. People appear offering opportunities for adventure, treasure, and a chance to uncover the mystery of the return of the dragons. Some are just folks who need your help, and you can assist them or not depending upon your desires.

Factions are groups that provide certain benefits and potentially align you with certain forces. You can join the Empire or rebellion, become an assassin or thief, rise to be Archmage of the magical college, or follow any number of other paths to carve out a unique career in the world of Skyrim. Impress the local leader, and you can even buy a home and decorate it.

The Dragonborn mystery is really the central plotline of Skyrim, but you can pick it up or drop as you please. The difficulty level scales along with your skill level, so no matter what order you tackle missions, the strength of the enemies will match your character’s abilities. No matter how you approach the Dragonborn plot, dragons will appear throughout the world. These dragon battles are large and somewhat challenging, but not so difficult as to become frustrating. Plus, at the end of each battle, you absorb the soul of the defeated dragon, thus adding more opportunities to expand your selection of shouts.

The combat mechanics are quite simple but provide for ample flexibility. Each of your character’s hands is bound to a button and can be assigned a weapon, shield, or spell. Favorite spells and gear can be called up while the game pauses, allowing you to cast a spell, switch to weapon and shield, and then switch back to a spell, with each hand acting independently. The spells themselves come in a wide array of categories, such as healing, summoning, attacks, traps, and more. The game also features an incredibly robust crafting element that allows you to make, improve, and sell all manner of items from armor to potions.

A character earns points towards his next level as he performs tasks and defeats foes, and with each new level comes one “perk” point. These perks are a complex matrix of enhancements to various skills, adding bonuses and new abilities in order to gradually customize your character around your style of play. Thus, you can spend points to enhance anything from haggling and lockpicking to shield bashing, sword skills, and spell power. As these points are spent, each character develops a unique set of abilities.

The flaws in Skyrim are intermittent and mostly technical. The game crashes occasionally on all platforms, and there are graphical glitches aplenty. Frankly, for a game of this size and complexity, I expected far more of these problems than I found, and the ones I did encounter rarely had a huge impact on the overall experience. I’ve seen far worse in far less ambitious games.

And this is an ambitious game, perhaps moreso than any other open world game yet created. It is a masterpiece of worldbuilding and epic storytelling, rich in content and featuring an immense amount of gameplay. It’s impossible to say how long it would take to see and do everything in the game, but Bethesda has claimed 300 hours of potential gameplay. It’s easy to believe. This is a monster of a game, and a masterpiece of interactive art.

Welcome to a New Year of Gaming

Good Lord, has it been a month already? These festive seasons sure do take their toll. Between finishing a semester in graduate school, work, and fending off an evil, soul-sucking mortgage company, it's been all I can do to get from dawn to dusk with my usual 3 hour nap and 2 hour martini break in between.

Seriously, though, I've been going through almost stratospheric levels of stress lately, and it's taken a toll on my writing, my health, and my sanity (which some would claim was already pretty fragile)(and by "some" I mean mostly my mother). It's also cut deeply into the extra gaming time, which is what (in theory) makes State of Play more than just a repository for my print writing. Board and card game play has fallen off a cliff, and it's all I can do to write for work while still leaving time to live a full and happy life as a High Elf Werewolf Companion Archmage Thief Legionnaire with two houses, a wife, a couple of housecarls, some daedra, and a horse with a unquenchable desire to charge into every dragon encounter and promptly get either barbecued, frozen, or eaten.

(I've been through 6 horses, and my daughter is running out of chocolate-themed names to give them. We've had Chocolate, Hershey, Snickers, Musketeer (he lasted about an hour--tried to stomp a bear to death--failed), Reeses, and M&M, and I'm afraid I'm about to wind up with M&M With Peanuts, which is just all kinds of wrong.  Why the chocolate names? Because Bethesda, which has populated Skyrim with hundreds of unique creatures, seems incapable of making a horse in any color but "brown", and I sold naming rights to my horses to a 10-year-old girl in exchange for leftover Halloween candy.)

So am I abandoning State of Play? Nope. I'm still here. Just slowing down while life kind of reforms around me. I'm increasing my school schedule and my non-game writing, and still working my way through the insanely ill-conceived and horribly implemented HAMP process. That means posting will be intermittent, but I've put down a fairly solid footprint here and don't intend to abandon it. 

And I'm looking forward to a new year of gaming. I have a stack of good stuff waiting for the table, and the electronic platforms have been an absurdly rich banquet of high-quality titles. I'm about to post my review of the most high-qualityist of them all right after this, so stay tuned.

INTERVIEW: Alf Seegert Takes the Road to Canterbury

Alf Seegert and friend playing Road to Canterbury

I don't recall when I first heard about The Road to Canterbury, but I knew I had to have it. I'm a huge fans of Middle English literature in general and Chaucer in particular, and was a member of the New Chaucer Society for a time. There's something in the strange beauty of the language, at once alien and familiar, that makes Middle English remarkably appealing. The Canterbury Tales in particular pulse with life and meaning, capturing a huge range of styles and emotions from highly cultivated to utterly base. (If the language is a real obstacle for you, just pick up a decent translation, such as David Wright's from Oxford World Classics rather than the newer one from Burton Raffel. It's worth taking the time to learn the original language, but if it's between a translation and nothing, then read a translation.)

Regular readers of SOP will know that I've covered the game several times since I first learned about it, but I like to have a number of plays before I commit to a final review. Short version: it's very good! A longer version will have to wait until it gets to the table at least one or two more times.

Recently, I got a chance to sit down with designer Alf Seegert (and by "sit down" I mean that we were both sitting at our computers at opposite ends of the country doing an email interview) to talk about his career and his latest game.

Alf's first two games, Bridge Troll (Z-Man games, $25) and Trollhalla (Z-Man Games, $50), each made the Games 100, and his newest game, The Road to Canterbury (Eagle Games, $60) is heading for the list as well., Seegert, a professor of English at the University of Utah, started designing game 10 years ago, and five of his early designs were finalists at the annual Hippodice board game design competition in Bochum, Germany: The Vapors of Delphi (2nd place, 2004), Bridge Troll (end-round finalist, 2005 -- later published by Z-Man Games), Ziggurat (end-round finalist, 2005), Mont-Saint Michel (end-round "Recommended Title," 2007), and TEMBO (3rd place, 2008 -- later published by Z-Man Games as Trollhalla). With Road to Canterbury, Seegert finally gets to merge his love of literature with his love of gaming, offering a unique take on Chaucer’s famous tales of garrulous pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.

Give us a bit of your gamer biography. What genres and styles have appealed to you throughout your life?

I didn’t become completely captivated by games until I was a teenager, when fantasy role-playing systems like Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls became a safe-haven for me. I loved Milton Bradley's electronic board game Dark Tower and in ninth grade I programmed a version of it into the high school mainframe computer (I used little monochrome ASCII characters to represent each player, the Tombs, the Bazaar, etc.). But except for an occasional session of the fantasy game Talisman, I didn't play many board games again until I hit thirty. I was spending a lot of time by myself playing computer games--and my girlfriend (now my wife) wanted me to play games with her instead. We did some research and stumbled on The Settlers of Catan, which proved a potent gateway drug into the brave new world (well, new to us) of Eurogames. Once we introduced Catan to our friends, Saturday nights quickly became a regular and much-anticipated “game night” event, which has continued now for over ten years.

What prompted you to make the leap from player to designer?

After encountering the brave new world of Eurogames, it wasn’t long before I felt compelled to take themes that interested me and make board games out of them. Sometimes it worked. Before long, I had several prototypes based on everything from geology to archaeoastronomy to ancient mythology to fairy tales. I sent some of my better designs to the Hippodice board game design competition in Bochum, Germany where several became finalists. With help from my fellow designers in the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah (www.bgdg.info), eventually I was able to interest major publishers in my designs and I’m on my way to my fourth published game as we speak.

Tell us a bit about your first published games, Bridge Troll and Trollhalla. How would characterize them, and what let to their development and publication? Also: what's with the troll thing?

I had encountered a sculpture in downtown Salt Lake City showing a Navajo woman leading sheep across a narrow bridge. I thought to myself how fun (and silly) it would be to put one of those wild-haired Scandinavian “Troll Dolls” beneath it, in homage to the fairy tale of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Somehow the idea of actually playing one of these trolls became very appealing to me. In Bridge Troll you get to play as a troll who eats and extorts the travelers who try to cross your bridge. In Trollhalla I took these trolls out to sea where they became Viking-like marauders out to pillage and plunder islands full of pigs and peasants, nervous monks, and panicked princesses. Although these are both Eurostyle board games, they feel a bit like role-playing games to me because the players actually get to play the monsters. Part of my fascination with trolls was instilled in me during childhood by my Danish mother, who was convinced that scary trolls lived beneath the bridge in her hometown. Trolls are big in Scandinavia!

What elements of The Canterbury Tales made you think they might make a good theme for a game? Were you concerned that some might be bothered by the religious satire?

I grew up on British comedies like Monty Python and Black Adder, and I see both of them as inspired by Chaucer’s irreverence six hundred years on. In The Canterbury Tales, a company of medieval pilgrims journeys together from the Tabard Inn at the outskirts of London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, entertaining each other with stories along the way. Some of these tales are incredibly bawdy (and very funny). Many challenge existing social hierarchies and expose the hypocrisy of those who supposedly represent God and the church. Satire is a useful tool for cultural critique, and Chaucer was a Christian genuinely disturbed by religious corruption—and he found humor a better (and safer) vehicle for critique than direct denunciation. I thought it would be fun to make a humorous and “Chaucerian” game inspired by Chaucer’s own work. In The Road to Canterbury you play a greedy pardoner, and to succeed in filling your coin purse, you need to pardon pilgrims’ sins for quick cash. But to keep yourself in business you also have to tempt pilgrims to commit these very sins in the first place! You will bring along a special supply of bogus relics like “The Miraculous Moustache of Saint Wilgefortis” (a female, I might add) to help the pilgrim drive away unwanted sins and the like. So far, it appears that the theme of my game is sufficiently absurd that it draws more laughter than ire, even from the religiously inclined.

How does the theme mesh with the mechanics of play?

The game combines hand management, area control, and press-your luck mechanics: you must always make tough choices on whether to tempt a pilgrim to sin or to collect coins by pardoning sins in play. The catch is that the value of pardoned sins increases geometrically as the Sin cards accumulate, so you are “tempted” to let them really pile up—although doing so risks another player beating you to the punch! You can also cleverly play Relic cards to add some chaos to the game and deviously foil your opponents’ plans. I’ve put together a little Flash tutorial to help new players get a grip on how it all works at www.theroadtocanterbury.com

How did you choose the art and develop the aesthetic elements of the game?

A few years ago I stumbled upon Hieronymus Bosch’s tabletop painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. Bosch’s deranged and demonic imagery and the rondel-style circle in the middle of the tabletop made me think that his painting might serve well as a game board, so I attempted a “posthumous collaboration.” It seems to have worked very well! Players say they love Bosch’s art on the board and on the Sin Cards, which give close-up images of Bosch’s representation of each individual “Deadly Sin.” I am a professor of English, so it was only natural to bring in seven pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales to create an unnatural Bosch-Chaucer hybrid. Each pilgrim has their own “favorite sin”: the Knight suffers from Pride, the Miller from Wrath, the Monk from Gluttony, etc., and for these illustrations Gryphon Games secured images from the early 15th Century Ellesmere Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. The game’s “fine art” approach made it a suitable successor to Gryphon’s recent game Pastiche.

I understand you've achieved some measure of fame as a bad writer. What is the worst sentence you've ever written?

Well, my “claims to fame” in fiction writing are indeed all bad fiction entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where the goal is to compose the worst opening sentence to a novel. I have scored several “Dishonorable Mentions” so far. My most efficient example is this one:

“The Zinfandel poured pinkly from the bottle, like a stream of urine seven hours after eating a bowl of borscht.”

And here is my best attempt to write an entire story in the self-enclosing style of Borges in a single sentence:

“Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth--or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn't, which is why it was heretical to say that it did--and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place.”

The Lewis Chessmen in New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting the Lewis Chessmen until April 22, 2012. Thirty of the 78 pieces will be on display in the Romanesque Hall at the Cloisters. It's rare for such a large chunk of the collection to appear outside of the UK.

The Lewis Chessmen are the most significant game pieces ever discovered. They almost certainly were made in Norway in the 12 century, and then shipped west for sale to the upper classes of the British Isles. Carved from walrus tusks, their beautiful craftsmanship and unusual designs have captivated people since their discovery in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. 

The figures were part of a hoard buried in the sand, and including pieces from at least 5 chess sets, pieces for the game of Tables, and a buckle. This Salon story plays up the "mystery" angle, but there really isn't anything mysterious about them. Beautiful? Impressive? Important? Yes. But there's no real need to turn it into a mystery story. The Baghdad Battery is mysterious. The Lewis Chessmen were cargo retrieved from a shipwreck, and perhaps buried with plans for later retrieval. All the other stories are purely for the tourists. 

My personal favorite has always been the berserker biting his shield (a Rook, shown above), his eyes wide with lunatic rage in the full fever of a battle frenzy. The pieces are the rarest kind of game art, mixing humor, pathos, stateliness, satire, and perhaps even political commentary. (This doesn't look like the image of a King which a king would endorse.)  

Then, of course, there's the Queen (shown at right). She's not sure why you just did what you did, but she's really disappointed with you.

We'll never know the name of their craftsman, now dead and forgotten nine centuries ago, but he was an artist of the first order. Get to the Met and see for yourself. It's a rare opportunity.

H/T: Thanks to the Accordeonaire extraordinaire Gary Chapin for the tip.

Comments Temporarily Turned Off

An aggressive twit has been carpet-bombing my site with spam all morning, so comments are turned off for now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

And a special message to my friendly spamming weenie: every single thing you posted is gone, so you'll have to haunt somewhere else to shill your casino scams. I do have to admit that it was hard to delete such wonderful chinglish flattery as "Your work is very good and I appreciate you and hopping for some more informative posts. Thank you for sharing great information to us…"

Draw a Stickman

Your Monday morning time-waster is this charming little slice of interactive animation.

Ticket to Ride on iPhone/Touch

Up till now, the mobile version of Days of Wonder's hit train game Ticket to Ride has only be available for iPad, but today DOW is rolling out a tiny version for handheld iOS devices as well.

The new app delivers the original game with the US map, four AI opponents, and various achievements and leaderboards. There is no online mode, but pass-and-play and local multiplayer via Bluetooth or WiFi is included, and functions among all iOS devices.


Sez the Official Press Release: "The distinctive feature set we developed for this Pocket version makes it the definitive way to enjoy Ticket to Ride as a ‘spur-of-the-moment’ mobile gaming experience," said Eric Hautemont, CEO of Days of Wonder. "The new local network play also makes Ticket to Ride Pocket the perfect companion for Ticket to Ride for iPad customers eager to play with family and friends in the comfort of their home or while traveling."

T2R gets a heavy workout here, and remains the bridge game we use to introduce noobs to the world beyond Monopoly. Now Ticket to Ride is in my pocket, and I am glad to see it. I hope to get it soon and post a full review.

REVIEW: Gubs

GameWright Games
Price: $12
Players: 2-6
Ages: 10+
Time: 10-20 minutes

The first layer of family game testing here at Casa McD is the hardest. New titles are subjected to rigorous examination and play-testing by a team of the best 10-13-year-olds money can buy. If your family game doesn't pass muster with them, it will certainly be given further consideration, but it will have an uphill battle.

Gubs is the first game since Sleeping Queens to hit the tables and become a hit immediately. We began with a dozen 2-player hands, and spent the next few days demanding everyone else give it a try. Even normally jaded gamers (and I'm not singling out teenagers here ... no, wait, I am) managed to bestir themselves from their usual indication of intense approval ("yeah, it's fine") to call it "really addictive" and demand more hands. That's a pretty clear indication that GameWright has another success on their hands.

Gubs is credited to Cole and Alex Medeiros, with fantastic artwork by Israel Woolfolk. On the website, Cole tells the story of the game's evolution from a homemade project for family and friends, to self-publishing, and finally to the slick treatment given to the game by GameWright. Everything from art, to rules, to card design, to fun-factor, to play balance is spot-on. It even comes in my favorite packaging: the compact embossed tin.

A "gub" is kind of a bug-like fairy creature. They ride toads and giant moths, hide behind mushrooms, and face threats from all manner of fey creatures. A feather is enough to dispel a powerful attack, but a soap-bubble can trap them. The world and the characters mines the same kind of lore which made Spiderwick such a success, placing players in a charming world hiding just beyond our gen.

Gameplay
Gubs is a card game, and the goal is to collect as many gubs as possible before you draw a final letter card spelling out the word "G-U-B". Play is from a single deck of 70 cards, with each player starting with a hand of three cards, and one free gub face-up in front of them.

A gub must be played to the table to count for points, and each one may either be free, barricaded, or trapped. A free gub is just a gub card on the table, with nothing on top of it. These may be lured away easily by other players to become part of their gub lineup. If player places a barricade (toad, moth, or mushroom) on top of the gub, then that gub cannot be lured away. Gubs may also be "trapped" by gold rings or "sud spouts." Trapped gubs do not count towards the final score, but they also cannot be lured away once trapped.

These fundamental elements are put through myriad modifications by event, hazard, tool, and interrupt cards.

• Event cards are unique, changing the game suddenly by adding dangerous events to play. A Rumor of Wasps may force all gubs on toads back into the deck, while the Travelling Merchant forces everyone to pass their hands (except for one card) to the right. 
• Hazards are the cards that can change the balance of play in an instant. A lure, for example, allows a player to take an unprotected gub from another player, but a super lure allows a player to take all free and protected gubs from another player. Cyclones can clear all the barricades from a target player. Lightning can kill the Esteemed Elder, the only gub in the game that can't otherwise be stolen or killed. These hazards are what give Gubs its unique feel and create radical, rapid turns of fortune. A player can go from leader to nothing in a single card.
• Interrupts are what make the vicissitudes of hazards bearable. These cards can be played at any time to negate an event or hazard, and are the key to a good defense.
• Tools are ways to manage your hand and your gubs, allowing you to break the ring enchanment, retreat all gubs and barricades back into your hand, sneak a peak at the deck or another player's hand, or even kill a gub.

Verdict
Despite the diversity of cards and card types, this is not a hard game to teach or learn. The basics can be grasped in a couple of minutes, while the subtleties and tactics become clear after a few hands.

Everything about Gubs just works. The art, rules, and flavor text quickly convey the appealing, fun, magical world of the gubs. With just a hand of cards, you're drawn instantly into the life and challenges of a hidden world. The sudden turns of fortune can be maddening, but the balance of cards makes it quite fair. There's a brutal quality to way cards can be lost or stolen, and this can really irritate younger players, right up until they get to do it to someone else.

This is the kind of light, fast game that some call "filler," but I don't think that's quite fair. Filler games are usually warmups before or between bigger, better games, but Gubs stands well on its own and demands repeat play. We've gone through 8 hands in a single sitting, in part because it can play very quickly, but also because the mix of cards provides a fresh experience each time. This one is going to have a long life.

Quoits: It's Not Horseshoes, Really (English Pub Games Series)

The complete story of English pub games will appear in the March 2012 issue of Games Magazine.

Quite a few traditional pub games involve hurling potentially lethal objects through the air while consuming large quantities of alcohol. Take quoits, for instance. The first thing to remember is that quoits is not horseshoes, even though they look similar. Unlike darts, quoits actually does have a fairly ancient pedigree on English soil, dating at least to the Middle Ages. King Richard II banned it 1388 because the lower classes were playing it rather than working themselves death. Edward III and Henry V also banned the game, with a punishment of six days in prison for violators.

(One curious pattern in English gaming culture is the way certain games are banned from play by the laboring classes, while permitted for the upper classes. This happens over and over again, with almost every pub game banned some point, and many of the laws written to specifically exclude “gentlemen” from the ban.)

The earliest version of quoits involved simply throwing an object at a target on the ground, with victory going to the person nearest the target. The game really took off in the early 19th century with the growth of industrial labor, and the pubs began maintaining quoits greens and organized league play. In 1881, an amateur association created a semi-standard set of rules that was adopted by most of England. Naturally, these new rules were promptly ignored by the Scots and Welsh.

The basic “northern game” of quoits is played with a heavy, round steel disc, open at the center and weighing 5 ¼ pounds. Spikes (called “hobs”) are set 11 yards apart, with tips protruding three inches above a clay bed. A ringer scored two points, while the nearest quoit scored one point.

The Scots and Welsh stuck to their “long game,” which was played at a distance of 25 yards with quoits that could weight upwards of 15 pounds.

When thrown, these rings tend to imbed themselves in the clay, leading to unusual landing configurations and strange leaning positions requiring careful judging by officials. The game has more room for depth and strategy than horseshoes, in part because the flared circular shape allows for various kinds of hand holds with exotic names like The Frenchman, push pot, and face gater.

In Cornwell, people played a version of quoits called “kook,” with the objective being either to throw the ring father than the opponent, or closer to the target. In loggats, another regional variant, people threw smalls logs or bones at a stake planted in the ground, with the winner being whoever hit it or got closest. Henry VIII banned it, perhaps because he wasn’t yet finished with the bones. Hamlet mentions the game as he observes the gravedigger disinterring Yorick, asking, “Did the bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggats with them?”

Kindle: The Next Front in the App War?

I wasn't too surprised to learn this morning that Amazon is highlighting gaming and multimedia potential of their new Fire device. That's one benefit from making an Android compliant product. Today's press release  highlights the enthusiasm of the game companies:

“EA is proud to be part of Kindle Fire,” said Bernard Kim, Senior Vice President & Head of Global Sales and Marketing at Electronic Arts. “On Kindle Fire, we're offering some of the world’s most popular titles with incredible gameplay and breathtaking graphics that anyone can play and enjoy anytime, anywhere.”

"We're excited to be bringing our massively popular games to Kindle Fire," said Andrew Stein, Director of Mobile Product Management at PopCap Games. “Kindle Fire is a great gaming device, and consumers will love the touch-screen optimized adaptations of top titles such as Plants vs. Zombies.”

And so on. Thus far, Android has not proven itself as a strong gaming platform to the same degree as iOS has. Amazon is positioned to change that. I've read a lot of tech pundits dismissing the Fire because it's less powerful than an iPad. This is a mistake. The low cost of the Fire and its double-duty as an kind of e-reader is exactly what should make it successful. The power of the device is secondary. If it feels sturdy (as Kindles all do), runs Angry Birds, provides a decent web experience, and allows people to download and read books, then that's all it needs to do. The price--not the processing power--is the biggest feature.

DC Universe Online Goes Free

Sony Online Entertainment announced that players can now download and play its massively multiplayer online (MMO) action game DC Universe Online (DCUO) for free. Starting today, all PC and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system players can create their own hero or villain and join forces with their favorite DC Comics characters. Here's what they have to say about it:

There are three access levels in DCUO: Free, Premium and Legendary. All three levels will provide access to the game and include all game updates and fixes to the game, with each level offering differing game options and features. DLC content and features will also be included for Legendary players, and can be purchased by Free and Premium players. The levels include:

Free Access: New players now have access to the base game content in DC Universe Online, including Gotham City, Metropolis, and all current raids and alerts outside of DLC packs. Free Access provides players with the ability to create two characters, join a League and many other benefits. Free level players can also purchase DLC packs, additional character slots, and more in-game.

Premium Access: Any player who has spent at least $5 USD (including former paid subscribers and new players who have purchased $5 of in-game items) qualifies for the Premium Access level. Premium level players have more benefits available to them than the Free level player, including additional character slots, additional inventory slots, and higher cash limits. DLC packs, additional character slots, and more can be purchased in-game. All previous subscribers are granted Premium Access automatically.

Legendary Access: Legendary Access provides the most content, features and benefits of the three access levels. Loaded with enhanced features, Legendary Access is available for a $14.99 USD monthly fee (multi-month discounts are available) and includes access to all DLC packs at no cost, more than 16 character slots, over 60 inventory slots, the ability to form Leagues, and many other benefits. 

REVIEW: Space Marine

When my son started going to Games Workshop stores about a year ago, I thought: "This is what happens when you're not careful about what you leave lying around the house." Fortunately, he was satisfied with a single set and didn't start buying $40 figures and giant foam terrain blocks. He's moved on to D&D, which has a different type of geek cred and is far less expensive.

Why yes, I am raising nerds. You got a problem with that?

You see, the “Warhammer” system isn’t just a game: it’s a lifestyle choice. First introduced by Games Workshop in 1983, the series provides rules and settings for tabletop miniature wargames. Set in a fantasy universe heavily derived from the work of JRR Tolkien, the initial Warhammer Fantasy series pitted humans, “Orks,” elves, and other typical fantasy races against each other in epic battles carried out with little painted models. Five years later, Games Workshop projected their entire system 40,000 years into the future with Warhammer 40,000, creating an even more popular science-fiction universe.

The model-building element, combined with the constant additions, upgrades, and rules changes, makes Warhammer an expensive and labor-intensive hobby. Entire stores are dedicated to selling products, running tournaments, and providing gaming space.

In the decades since its creation, the Warhammer worlds have spawned an immense amount of published material, adding extraordinary layers of detail and baroque flourishes to these imaginary worlds. They have provided the setting and inspiration for a number of excellent games on both PC and videogame consoles. The latest, Space Marine, is an unusual extension of the popular Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War strategy games into the realm of third-person acting gaming.

The Dawn of War titles are the work of Relic Entertainment, creators of inventive computer strategy games such as Homeworld, Impossible Creatures, and Company of Heroes. These real-time strategy games allow the user to command Warhammer armies in a series of mission-based battles set within a narrative framework. One of the appealing qualities of Dawn of War is the ability to zoom out to a view of the entire battlefield to make command decisions, and then zoom down to ground level to watch the soldiers as they fight.

Essentially, Space Marine removes the strategy element and puts the gamer at ground level for a more intense, wholly action-driven experience. In the process, Relic has stripped out all the depth and finesse that characterizes their best work to focus solely on melee combat and gunplay. The result is a fairly exciting game, but one that misses multiple opportunities to create a deeper, more fulfilling gameplay experience.

The game follows the exploits of Captain Titus and two other soldiers as they attempt to fight back an Ork invasion of a “forge world”: a planet comprised solely of factories turning out vital military equipment. There is a narrative of sorts, but its primary purpose is to glue missions together and imbue them with some sense of urgency. Peripheral characters merely exist to swoon over the awesomeness of the Ultramarines, or to kill and/or betray them. On the positive side, the production values are very good, with strong voice acting from the leads and effective cinematic sequences.

The gameplay features somewhat simplistic third-person action fare, with endless waves of expendable foes and a minimal level of sophistication. Gamers proceed on a very linear route through various locations in the forge world. Along the way, they gather new weapons and ammo and utterly obliterate everything in their path.

The primary enemy is the Ork, a green-skinned brute that comes in various shapes, sizes, and threat-levels. In the world of Warhammer, Orks are a genetically engineered fungus imbued with a rudimentary intelligence. This means that they attack every situation with thousands of shock troops, attempting to make up in sheer quantity what their soldiers lack in quality.

Ultramarines cut through this canon fodder like butter with a weirdly implausible array of weapons, such as giant shock hammers and chainsaw-bladed swords. This close-in combat is the heart of Space Marine, allowing gamers to string together attacks in order to chop through the onrushing wall of murderous monsters. New guns are collected as the gamer proceeds, adding more strength or new features to the available firepower.

It’s hard to deny the visceral appeal of the combat. The Ork blood and gore is so extreme that it verges on parody, like the encounter with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Nevertheless, the violence is brutal, constant, and vivid. It is the entire point of the game, and thanks to the squishing and crunching sound effects, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Late in the game, a new enemy emerges: Chaos marines, accompanied by hoards of demonic shock troops. These require a subtly different strategy to fight, but they don’t change the equation all that much. The game is at the end what it was in the beginning: pure hack-and-shoot action. Since Captain Titus is always accompanied by two other Ultramarines, it would have been a simple matter to add a tactical control element to Space Marine, thus giving the game the depth it’s sorely lacking.

The game plays fairly well on Xbox, but is a wretched, glitch-filled, completely unacceptable experience on PC. 

National Gaming Day Is...

... November 12th. The American Library Association is promoting a day of gaming at more than 1100 libraries across the country. Sponsor FamilyAndPartyGames.com is donating 3,000 copies of Loaded Questions, Awkward Family Photos, The Greatest Day Ever Game, and Loaded Questions Junior for the event. Various libraries will host board games, video games, and RPGs. Check the site to see if your library is participating. 

Oil Springs of Catan and Ethical Gaming

Catan: Oil Springs is an impressive, free-to-download variant to the Mother of all Eurogames. Settlers on the island of Catan have struck oil. This new resource can be used like gold, or added to other resources to upgrade a City to a Metropolis. Its use, however, comes with a price: for every five oil used, an environmental disaster strikes. Based on the roll of the dice, this could be the removal of coastal settlements or the pollution of tiles so they no longer produce resources.

I won't pretend to agree with its anti-oil politics, but I have to give the designers credit for turning out an intelligent variant for Settles of Catan. The scenario is the work of Erik Assadourian and Ty Hansen, and was developed as part of Transforming Cultures Project of the Worldwatch Institute. Clearly, it was created with an agenda, despite protests to the contrary:

While taking on issues of pollution and climate change, we strongly wish to emphasize that we do not see this as a polarizing political effort, but simply as a way to draw attention to the tradeoffs inherently embedded in the usage of natural resources such as oil. The use of oil has brought with it great benefits, and it is not our intention to condemn its use in a general sense. However, science has shown that its overuse is now having a destabilizing effect on our climate, and responsible use has become more important than ever before. Our intention with this scenario is to draw attention to these challenges in a way that is both educational and enjoyable.

Given the design of the game, this claim is just silly. Using oil wipes out settlements and turns the landscape into a wasteland, which kind of makes it a "polarizing political effort" even for those of us who support common sense solutions to sustainability. I have no problem with that, mind you. If you have a case to make, make it boldly. Just don't pretend you're not creating a fairly obvious piece of anthropogenic global warming propaganda.

Those issues aside, I like it, with minor reservations. The new rules radically change the dynamics, forcing people to interact at a different level to make decisions about exploitation of oil. I'm not sure how much life it will have, since its agit-prop origins give it the grim, "eat your peas" tone of a lecture. The balance of the game is a bit off. Environmental catastrophe is an inevitable byproduct of using oil. This is only slightly mitigated by the ability of players to "sequester" oil, which involves shutting down oil production. (Do this three times and you gain 1 victory point.)

Thus, the game functions more like a social experiment, as players try to convince others not to pull the oil trigger even though it could mean victory. Since the point of playing is to win, this isn't really a reasonable approach from a perspective of pure gamesmanship. Opting out of a game-winning strategy in the interest of burnishing your environmental credibility in front of three-to-five other people shifts the focus from "game" to "social statement."

The issue of ethics and moral decision making in gaming is a deep and fascinating subject that has played an increasing role in computer and video game design over the past few years, but hasn't really made an impact on conventional gaming. This is largely because board games lack the character and narrative elements that make moral choices possible. With Oil Springs, some of that ethical decision making comes to Catan, but not quite as effectively. Video and computer games almost always provide a balanced approach to moral decisions: good or evil choices produce different results without stopping the game cold. There's less of that balance in Oil Springs. Evil has a name, and it is Oil. Every disaster roll produces a disaster. Catastrophe is inevitable. This changes the gaming dynamic from "dialog" to "lecture," with a pre-ordained outcome.

You can print out all the rules and pieces for free. Attach them to card stock or cardboard for better play. 

Aunt Sally: More Things to Knock Down Without Spilling Your Beer

Aunt Sally was the inspiration for my research into English pub games. The game was featured the British detective series Midsomer Murders, which regularly explores the bizarre festivals and customs of rural England. We couldn't tell what in the world the characters were doing or why, since we'd never seen anything quite like it. A little digging uncovered not only the rules and origins of Aunt Sally, but also the wonderful and weird world of traditional pub gaming. 

The complete story of English pub games will appear in the March 2012 issue of Games Magazine.

Photo from www.joinersarms.com

The Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports calls the origins of the skittle-like game Aunt Sally “obscure,” but offers several possibilities for its mysterious name. “Sally” is a dialect word for “hare,” and throwing-sticks were sometimes used to hunt hares in the 19th century. A more likely explanation is that “sally” means to pitch forward, and “aunt” is a reference to the vaguely feminine shape of the target. The French name is the far more evocative Wholesale Slaughter (“jeu de massacre”), which is just plan odd.

The modern version involves throwing six sticks 18 inches long and 2 inches round at a target. A pole, four feet tall, is set into the ground, while a fat white skittle with a bulbous head perches on the top. The goal is to knock this doll from its perch, with a point scored each hit. Players throw their 6 sticks in 4 rounds, for a maximum total of 24. It’s actually much harder than it sounds, and a score of 20 points is considered superb.

The game may have evolved out of a cruel bloodsport called “throwing at cocks”. A live chicken was tied to the top of a pole, and people took turns throwing sticks until someone killed it. The “winner” got to take the chicken home for the pot. It was usually played on Shrove Tuesday.

Joseph Strutt, in his 1801 book The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period, says that “Upon the abolition of this inhuman custom, the place of living birds was supplied by toys.” The game found its way from fairgrounds and fetes to the pub, where it shed its cruel heritage and became almost respectable as one of the “lawful games on licensed premises.” Local leagues are organized around pubs, and Championships are held in August and September. The game surged in popularity in the 20th century, with the Oxford League alone counting 120 teams, and six other leagues cropping up in pubs around the country.

In his definitive book Played at the Pub, author Arthur Taylor estimates that “come summer, over 2,500 men and woman can be found playing the game, usually on a Thursday night,” and indoors during winter. The popular British TV show Midsomer Murders even featured an Aunt Sally rivalry as a subplot in the episode “Dark Autumn,” which led to a minor resurgence of interest in the game. 

The game actually made it to American shores, and then migrated back to England in a new form around the year 1855. The American version involved throwing balls or batons at doll’s head affixed to a strike. The doll’s head had a pipe extending from it, and the goal was to knock the pipe off without hitting the head. In the game of Nacks, unique to Yorkshire, the target was a peg rather than a doll.