Strife: Legacy of the Eternals

10/28/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Strife: Legacy of the Eternals is a lot of game in a very small tin. The version that we at Major Fun played has 35 cards (20 characters, 10 locations, 4 score cards, and 1 quick guide), 1 ten-sided die, and a single sheet for the rules. The game is currently near the end of a spectacularly successful Kickstarter campaign and it looks like more cards will be added thanks to their stretch goals; however, the basic game boils down to 10 characters vs 10 characters battling over 10 locations.

Players start with the same 10 characters. These characters (fantasy epic stalwarts like Barbarian, Necromancer, and Paladin) each have 2 special abilities: a Battle Ability and a Legacy Ability. These abilities determine who wins a confrontation. These confrontations occur in Locations. These Locations provide points for the players. These points determine who wins.

A game starts with a face-up Champion in front of each player—this is the Legacy Champion. Each turn, a player chooses a Battle Champion and places it face-down on the table. The Champions are numbered 0 – 9. When they are revealed, the highest number goes first—that player can choose to use the Champion’s Battle Ability or not. The lower Battle Champion may then go. The players then activate their Legacy Champions in the same way—high number goes first. After the battle abilities and legacy abilities have been used, they player with the highest Battle value wins the location and takes the points.

The Battle Champion is moved to the top of the Legacy Pile (become the new Legacy Champion) and the players choose new Battle Champions.

What makes the game so enthralling—and Major Fun—is the way in which the abilities interact with each other to produce surprising results. Some abilities increase battle value. Some abilities allow Champions to be swapped. Some abilities cancel abilities. It is not enough to have the Champion with the highest battle value. The Battle Champion and the Legacy Champion must work together to win. Players must be clever and patient: each character will be a Battle Champion ONCE in a round. You have to play your cards wisely because at some point you will have to use each one.

Strife is a perfect information game in that each player starts with the same cards, and each knows what cards are being held by their opponent. The only mystery is when Battle Champions are placed face-down at a location.

There are almost no random elements in the game. This is a deeply strategic game. There is also an incredibly clever way to resolve ties. I won’t go into it here, but it uses the die (and rolling is not involved).

The art is distinctive and reminiscent of the painted illustrations in pulp fantasy magazines (the more family friendly ones—not the really lurid ones). The instructions are concise and clear. Your first game will take a while as you figure out how the abilities interact but within a turn or two the basic mechanics will be second nature and you can focus on what is really important: how you are going to stop that Barbarian and Necromancer from demolishing your Ranger.

2 players. Ages 10+

Blurble

08/13/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Blurble is a game like Anomia that gets a lot of laughs and game-play-mileage out of making you sound stupid.

You aren’t stupid. I know this because you are reading this web post. You also demonstrate great taste and a fine appreciation for the playful side of life. And in that last regard, Blurble is the game for you.

Just be warned: the longer you play the game, the dumber you will sound.

The game consists of a big deck of cards. How many cards, you ask? I’m not quite sure, but at a guess I would say more than 11. Yep, the box lid confirms there are more than 11 cards (489 more to be exact). The cards have pictures on them—illustrations of objects that are easy to identify (although one card had a plate of nachos that I was SURE was a pizza).

The game starts with a person called the “Blurbler.” Say it out loud. GO on. Now say it more than five times in a row. That kind of silly stupid tongue tied feeling is something you are going to have to get used to a lot. The Blurbler turns to the first person clockwise and flips up a card. The two players then races to say a word that begins with the same letter as the object in the picture.

BUT (and notice it is a big but…) there are legal words and there are illegal words. Words cannot be proper nouns, numbers, contractions, or contain fewer than 3 letters (when we played we misread the rules and so disallowed anything with less than 4 letters—harder but still tons of fun). Words may never be used more than once in a game. Finally, the word cannot name the image. For instance, if a picture of a cat comes up you cannot say cat nor can you say catatonic nor can you say vacation (va CAT ion). That last one you might be able to slip by the other players (who act as judges) but they could call you out for illegal Blurbling.

As the game goes on you do tend to get faster but you also tend to run into words that have already been used. You will find yourself tripping over some of the most basic words because you just can’t remember if the word has been used before.

One thing we really liked about Blurble is that you are not penalized for saying an illegal word. If you say an illegal word you just have to keep trying. Players just keep shouting out words (and a lot of gibberish) until they say a legal one.

Major Fun for lots of ages and big groups of people.

2-12 players. Ages 8+

Robot Turtles

07/04/201407/07/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Programming is one of those skills that many of my generation and older consider to be about as esoteric as alchemy. Hours of waving your hands over a table. Repeatedly typing thousands of lines of incomprehensible gibberish surrounded by symbols that we just assumed were there to create emoticons. And then… the glorious Technicolor splendor of the electronic universe opens up on our screens.

It’s MAGIC!!

I for one am thrilled that there are people out there who take the time to program our machines to perform any number of tasks. I don’t think I have much of that kind of creativity, but I recognize it as such. I also recognize that the reasoning and imagination that underlie coding are key components that we all need to develop in order to navigate our digital and analogue worlds. The logic of programming applies to business and creative writing and all the games we play.

In an effort to bring the kind of thinking that programming requires to younger audiences, ThinkFun has provided the world with the fantastic little board game Robot Turtles. The game, designed by Dan Shapiro, was successfully funded on Kickstarter. And when I say successfully I mean funded about 25 times Dan’s initial goal. Seriously. Check it out here.

And deservedly so. Robot Turtles is a great game that does a wonderful job of introducing young players in to the game mechanics. These game mechanics are also the basics of programming. It needs to be said that the game does not involve actually programming a computer. Instead, the game mechanics mimic the skills and reasoning that good programming requires.

The goal of the game is to move your turtle to your target gem. You have cards that you play in sequential order that tell your turtle to turn, move ahead, fire a laser, or repeat a series of actions. Each of these actions is introduced over a set of games that gradually increase the complexity of the tasks. This approach to teaching the game might be a little frustrating to older players but it makes the game accessible to very young children. The youngest players will appreciate just moving the turtle around the board. Once they have mastered basic sequential commands, they can progress on to more complex games. In the parlance of most computer games and role-playing games, they can level-up.

Adults could probably jump in to higher levels without playing the “tutorial” levels but this is designed to teach very young children. The pedagogy is solid and each level is fun.

Another aspect that I only appreciated after playing with my kids was the cooperative nature of the game. It can be competitive but it is not written that way. The game encourages you to play with pairs on each team—a young “Turtle Master” and an older “Turtle Mover.” The younger player chooses the cards and makes the decisions but does not actually move the turtle. That is the job of the “Turtle Mover.” In this way, the younger players get to order around the adults who are supposed to follow the instructions chosen by the kids (and provide entertaining sound effects). I’ve been a teacher for 18 years and it still took me by surprise just how exciting it was for the kids to boss around the adults. My daughter chose the cards and I did just what they told me to do. This was a great simulation of digital programming in which the programmer provides instructions that something else (the computer) has to follow.

The most interesting and complex cards were the function cards. These served as markers representing a set of action cards. The actions would always be carried out in the same way whenever a function card was played. For example, in order to turn around the turtle on the most basic level, a “programmer” would have to play two cards (right turn, right turn). At higher levels, the programmer could place two right turn cards and a function card off to the side. If the turtle ever needed to turn around in the game, the programmer would now only need to play one function card.

The game comes with three kinds of barriers which can impede the turtles. Ice blocks can be melted by a laser. Boxes can be pushed. Stone blocks are permanent. The instructions come with some suggested “maps” but you are encouraged to come up with your own challenges and then figure out how you can overcome them with the fewest moves.

Creativity is highly prized but so is efficiency.

The art and instruction are fantastic. The pacing is great for a very wide range of players, and the game play becomes remarkably robust after only a few instructional levels. This is Major Fun for kids and parents and teachers and anyone (like me) who sees that programming should be taught to everyone—neither for economic reasons nor for purely pragmatic reasons but rather because the skills are intrinsic to our development as a species.

And playing with them is fun.

And our new robot overlords are probably going to feed the programmers who brought them to life before they feed the humanities majors who keep churning out post-singularity dystopian fiction.

So maybe there are some pragmatic reasons…

2 – 5 players. Ages 4+