1K words
Component Cannabilism
We played War of the Ring last night, and again it delivered a wonderfully tense and atmospheric experience. This time we swapped out the figures for a set of cubes, discs and meeples recklessly plundered from Agricola, Age of Mythology, Carcasssonne and even some buttons (as we didn't have green or blue discs). It reduced the clutter on the map hugely and the game itself played out without any perilous toppling Nazgul or off map armies.
Iain has posted a valuable annotated map showing the end of the game. Initially the Shadow took the military route, attempting to crush Rohan and Gondor, but met unexpected resistance in Gondor (and almost lost the Witch King to a surprise attack). He was then thwarted in Rohan where a few units fought a valiant guerilla war before the inevitable end. By then though Gondor was pretty buffed up and should (probably) have invaded Moria.
Meanwhile the Fellowship had advanced unscathed about 4 spots on the map. Suddenly the Shadow switched tactics, sending Nazgul to track the Fellowship and moving was now perilous, furthermore the Witch King launched an invasion of the Shire stretching the Free People to the limit. The Fellowship was quickly reduced to the Ring bearers, and the Shire captured. Things now looked dire, but got worse when the only card that enabled Corruption Points to be healed was stolen by the Shadow, and the next 2 Hunt Tiles delivered 4 damage to administer the coup de grace! Even after discovering that the Nazgul tracking the Fellowship were getting too many hunt bonuses, I think the Free People were in too much of a mess to survive much longer anyway.
It was significantly easier with the cubes, so they have been carefully packed away so that they can be deployed rapidly the next time (unless we decide for some unaccountable reason to play Age of Mythology instead). I even upped my rating for the game to 9, when I get new reading glasses it might make it to a 10!
It plays music too
After 6 weeks of use, I still have mostly positive things to report on the iPhone. Well, overwhelmingly positive really. The small niggles are vastly outweighed by the fact that, for the tasks I use it for, it is far more productive than my previous phones. So much so that my PC is rarely used, the iPhone working well enough to keep track of most email and news/web tasks. Instant On has been something of a Holy Grail for the computing industry for many years, and has seen many false dawns. The iPhone comes closer to this ideal than anything I have used so far, being only a few seconds away from the core functions that I use it for (mail, Internet, ebooks, music). The iPod side of the iPhone works generally very well, and carries on playing without hiccup regardless of what you are running application-wise (apart from a few games of course, but even there many are now adding options to allow the iPod to be the in-game music).
Does this mean it is perfect? Of course not. We have already had 2 firmware updates which have addressed some stability and reception issues, but more tweaks are required, and some core features are still missing. The App Store is a mess, sorting through the dross is very awkward. There are issues with 3G reception, but I am used to them with my previous 3G phone, which also struggled to keep a 3G signal. On the whole though, the iPhone recovers reasonably quickly, flipping seamlessly between WiFi, 3G and Edge depending on availability. I am sure that stability and reception issues will be addressed in due course, the biggest remaining question mark is over when (or if) Apple will relax its restrictions on what applications can do. Many of these make sense, given the early state of the phone O/S, i.e not allowing applications to run in the background, and not allowing them to access data from other applications. But the lack of a shared file area doesn't make sense, and hopefully will be remedied in time.
Note that the restrictions do not prevent you consuming content from external sources, I read eBooks that I purchased years ago without trouble, and of course listen to music from my CDs etc. The limitations are more of convenience, it being sometimes awkward to get the data into the related application. For some though, these limitations are deal breakers, but there are options still - either jailbreak the device or simply use something else!
Gaming-wise, we have played a score of games of Agricola, and each one has left us wanting to play again. We are slowly working our way through the cards, discovering new ones as they appear and greeting old friends with delight. The Conservator occupation is always welcome, but while the Wet Nurse (which lets you expand your family when you expand your house) seems like a game-winner it can go horribly wrong if you expand too fast. Anything that lets you get a bit of extra food or resources with your actions seems to free up your options considerably, even the humble Basket or Mushroom Collector cards that gain food when collecting wood. The pattern of resource gathering and card play has altered subtly over time, before we would try and wait until a nice pile of the desired resource was available, but that makes it too attractive to the other players as well, so we now we tend to gather by installments. Similarly we have got smarter about the timing of playing the cards. But the game engine rarely lets you do everything that you hoped to!
We have also had another game of War of the Ring, which once again transcended the quite serious defects in components to deliver a tense nail biting climax with tremendous narrative. A few stragglers make up the tally, including Elasund, which we enjoyed but it felt quite thin compared to the thematic heavy weights mentioned earlier. War of the Ring is, of course, dripping in theme that creates a deep sense of immersion. Curiously, Agricola manages to seem strongly themed as well, and I am not really sure how it manages to pull this off. Somehow the sum of the actions, cards and components combine to flesh out the theme and make it real. Oh, and some enterprising individual has already created an Agricola scoring application for the iPhone to tie all threads of this rambling post together!
Grrr
Typepad Web App lost my long post.
Very annoying. I will retype it soon...
(sigh)
Three into one
I have always been a fan of portable audio, since the days of the Walkman, though I never really got into buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was the advent of the CD and the early Sony Discman that really got me going. These were battery gobbling behemoths (by todays standards), but they gave good quality music on the go. Eventually I got tired of carrying these around. But when Apple introduced the iPod that seemed just the ticket. I got a 10GB 1st generation iPod and used third party software (EphPod) to get music onto it because at that stage it was Mac only. It was a battery gobbling behemoth but suddenly you could have unheard of amounts of music with you.
About the same time I got a HP iPaq to use as PDA and for email/internet on the move. This worked reasonably well as a PDA, slightly less so for email and was pretty dreadful for Internet. It was also dismal for games, lacking dedicated controls and generally suffering from lack of quality titles. But in one area it was brilliant, it turned out to be an excellent eBook reader and I bought numerous books from Fictionwise, so I no longer had to carry paper books to read while commuting (even though a real paper book remains preferable).
So there I was carrying a phone, PDA and iPod. A few too many devices you might think? But then I ended up also carrying either Nintendo DS or GBA for quality gaming on the go. Something had to give.
I converged the phone and PDA into the iMate JasJar, which could have been a brilliant device (as well as a battery gobbling behemoth), but was crippled by poor performance and limited memory. Still, it was OK as a PDA, and poor as a phone, but stopped me carrying 1 gadget.
In the meantime various iPod iterations came and went (iPod 40GB, 8GB Nano, and finally 160GB iPod Classic). I also got a PSP to play 1 particular game (Final Fantasy Tactics) and got hooked on another (Disgaea) so I was still carrying 3 hefty devices around.
Enter the iPhone 3G. The first iteration of this did not appeal, as it lacked speedy internet and had no 3rd party apps (so no ebooks). This was remedied in the 3G version (and 3rd party apps made it onto the original iPhone as well). I could now replace iPod Classic and iMate JasJar with a single slim device (much smaller than I imagined, but as you may have noticed I have been carrying around devices on the hefty side). But would it work? The major argument against convergence is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be best of breed in all functions.So you end up with compromised functionality or performance in some (or all) areas.
Well, Apple have some pretty clever engineers and they have not (yet) achieved the impossible, but they have come pretty close. It is early days for the 3rd party applications, but already eReader (my ebook reader of choice) is available, albiet in a limited version, but a more fully featured version is imminent. What is there is more than enough to show that the iPhone can work perfectly well as an eBook reader. And it is faster and more stable (even in this rushed version) than eReader was on the previous platform. Plus you can listen to your music while reading, the two don't intefere with each other. The other applications that I used frequently on Windows Mobile (Pocket Informant, eWallet, ListPro) are all headed for the iPhone too. Full marks there in the future, if not just now.
As for games, there are a couple of very cute games that use the accelerometer to good purpose, and the hardware is certainly capable enough. It will certainly be a good platform for diverting games, ideal for a few minutes here and there. But whether someone develops the heavy duty games that you end up playing for months at a time is open to question at the moment. Also the lack of dedicated buttons may hamper games that require precise (or very rapid) timing, though this isn't an issue for my type of turn based strategy game. If Civilisation Revolution is ported to the iPhone that could be a winner!
The built in applications work well for the most part, brilliantly in the case of Safari, which does a tremendous job of rendering full web sites for a small screen and in a sprightly manner. In fact although people have complained the the iPhone 2.0 software is slow, it is still blazingly fast compared to my Windows Mobile phone. So much so that it is no barrier to using it. You can turn the device on, and be doing whatever it was that you wanted to do within a couple of seconds. I would still be waiting for the Jasjar to settle down, then waiting for it to load the required app, then waiting for it to acquire a signal etc. Just too fiddly and time consuming.
As an iPod it works very well, with the added advantage of not missing phone calls because you are listening to music and didn't hear the ringing! It also has 2 advantages over its iPod brethren in that it has a speaker and also volume control buttons (enabling quick adjustments without pulling iPhone from pocket). The speaker is tiny (obviously) but good enough to listen to a book and even music at a pinch. The larger screen makes video watching possible, but this is still a minor attraction to me. While talking about buttons though it is worth mentioning that it also has a toggle button that toggles all phone sounds on or off. You have to remember that Apple are famously niggardly at putting buttons on their devices, still sticking to single button mice even. So for them to assign a button to this facility makes you think that they believe it is very important. And it is! Doing the same thing on my Windows Mobile phone required (unreliable) 3rd party software or endless fiddling with dialog boxes to turn this or that off. A simple idea, perfectly executed. Oh, and you can also turn the blessed thing off. Completely off. Not just in some suspended animation. Off.
So what is there not to like? Many naysayers deplore the closed architecture and vice like grip of Apple over all aspects of the iPhone. This does have its disadvantages, to be sure, but is probably the main reason why it works so well out of the box. The battery life is dismal, though not much worse than my existing phone, which if I used it as much as I do the iPhone would run down just as fast. I am already used to charging frequently, so no big deal for me. The sync of contacts and calendar information from Outlook is a bit flaky, it kind of works, but not in a way that gives you great confidence. This does need improvement, but is addressable by software releases if they apply themselves to it (as are other notable omissions like Copy/Paste). But really, as a device that shoehorns iPod, phone, PDA and a bit of a games console into a (relatively) tiny enclosure it is totally remarkable.
9/10!
Effortless Entertainment
A quick update on the Agricola front - Raphael and I played 2 games yesterday in double quick time. Each took less than an hour, and both were very close, if somewhat on the low scoring side. I think we may have skipped a round in the first game (by turning over 2 round cards at once), as we both ended up with 5 unused spaces and just never seemed to get going. This was a shame as I had played out a great set of occupations including Tutor, Stonecutter, and Yeoman Farmer. We paid more attention to turning over round cards in the second game and this was wonderfully close and tense, eventually finishing 41-40 in my favour. I even got to play my Butter Churn that I never managed to play in the first game, but was fortunately dealt a second time.
It was all tremendously satisfying, especially with all the excellent Fimo resources. Z-Man have confirmed that an English upgrade kit will be available for early adopters, which is wonderful news, and I really look forward to exploring the "I" and "K" decks. Easily my favourite game at the moment, and inching upwards on the alltime scale as well...
Raphael's Farm (and stray jellybean)
My Farm
The Shadow Advances
Iain joined us on Tuesday for an epic game of War of the Ring. He played the Free Peoples, while Raphael and I controlled the Shadow forces. Despite starting early the game ran on into the night, as the Shadow concentrated almost entirely on watching for the Fellowship and crushing (totally obliterating) Gondor. The result was that the Fellowship limped into Mordor on 8 corruption, and lost all the remaining Fellowship members on the first step they took, drawing an Eye tile with 5 dice in the Eye box. Ouch. At this stage the Shadow had 7 points towards the 10 needed for victory, but chose to allocate many dice to stopping the Fellowship. Iain sensibly chose to suspend movement of the Ring and went for a surprise dash at military victory in the Northern Realms, taking Moria and beseiging Mt Gundabad. A force managed to recapture Moria to prevent this, but it was a close run thing. In the meantime though the Free Peoples had accumulated enough healing cards to take them down to 4 on the corruption track and the Fellowship recommenced their progress through Morder, while a tiny force of Shadow troops beseiged the Woodland Realm, capturing it would secure the final 2 points for victory. It was extremely tense and close. At the last gasp, the Shadow had 1 attempt to take the Woodland Realm (6 die rolls in total) but the 2 elven units clung on, allowing the Fellowship to destroy the ring and steal victory! Tremendous nail biting stuff.
The game succeeds despite the flaws in rules (unclear and poorly indexed) and components (difficult to read text on cards, confusing map, easily confused Free Peoples figures). Bizarrely I think the game would work better with simple wooden bits for armies, i.e. coloured cubes for regular, cylinders for elite, and maybe a meeple for leader. Not only would they fit easily on the map (once you take an army off to the side it is way too easy to lose track of it, and get it confused with reinforcements) different colours would make the Free Peoples easy to place and reinforce. You could even have wooden disks of the matching colour for use on the political track, instead of the unclear symbols. Iain is following up on the idea of spraying each nation with a different base colour, which would certainly help in the identification, but not the stacking problem. Perhaps this is another job for the Fimo modellers, making cubes and cylinders of various colours would suit even my modest modelling skills.
Yesterday we tried Ticket to Ride Card Game, the theme for which is even thinner than the board games. It involves a somewhat wacky mechanism of accumulating train cards of various colours in a face down stack that you are unable to review (so you have to remember what you have placed in there). These cards are used at the end of the game to fulfill ticket requirements, with unfilled tickets counting as negative VP. You can review your chosen tickets at any time and choose more if you think you have completed the ones you have. There is player interaction in that you cannot place down train cards in your "Railyard" if another player has that colour train in their yard, unless you place more of that colour (in which case they lose theirs). I never managed to work out a scheme for managing which tickets I had completed, whereas Genevieve and Raphael seemed blessed with perfect recall (the advantages of youth) or else they had a more organised scheme for placing train cards in their yard in the first instance. I came last both times! Not a bad little game, but definitely a filler, not the main course.
We also added Munchkin Expansions 5 & 6 to the Munchkin mix and played a game of that. Definitely not to be taken seriously, but the game can create some interesting mega-items with the new cards that add adjectives like "Flaming" or "of Doom" to existing items, so that Genevieve was wandering around in Flaming "Boots of Running Very Fast" with Theme Music! There were other amusing conjunctions throughout the game which was over fairly quickly, before it overstayed its welcome. A pleasant diversion.
On the PSP there remains one game, and one game only, and that is Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness. It has been lodged in the PSP since September, and remains endlessly enjoyable. There is still plenty to do and collect, which is the main reason for continuing, as I have been through the main story 3 times and the PSP Etna story once. There are surprising depths to the game, as illustrated by this small example. In the main castle (the game hub) there are many NPCs who perform useful services, such as running the store, controlling access to other worlds (where the story plays out) and to worlds within Items (which lets you level up Items), and so on. One of these lets you summon the Dark Assembly, a sort of Parliament of the Netherworld. One of your characters is chosen (by you) to address the assembly (made up of NPC Senators, some of extremely high level) to attempt to pass bills that open new areas, or improve the character addressing the assembly. Generally they are reluctant to support your proposal and often need to be bribed to switch their allegiance. If this fails, and the vote goes against you then you have the option of passing the bill by force, which basically means you have to defeat all the senators that voted against the proposal. This is initially quite difficult, but gets easier when you achieve 2 important things. The first is to realise that you can send additional party members (up to 9) in to help the individual who was addressing the Assembly, rather than expecting him or her to vanquish up to 30 foes by themself. I didn't realise this and forced a couple of bills through the hard way with a single character, who was basically very hard to hit, and so wore them all down. By accident I realised that I could send in help. Doh. The second is simply to get your main party members levelled up enough so that even Lvl700 Senators don't pose a problem.
Anyway, having achieved these two epiphanies, I set about opening the Cave of Ordeal at the start of another run through the story, which was denied by the Assembly, who had to be convinced of the error of their ways. This done I wandered over to the NPC who controls the Dimensional Gateway for my trip to the Cave of Ordeal. Only she wasn't there. There was just a grave! It seemed that one of the Senators who had turned up this time (the selection is random) included the Gatekeeper, who had unfortunately voted against me. Oops. This essentially meant that 60% of the game was denied to me since I could not go anywhere, and I had saved the game immediately after passing the bill. Double oops. Fortunately the developers were a forgiving bunch and reloading the save game restored the Gatekeeper, but it was a nice little feature!
Dawn of Steam
We had an excellent introduction to 1825 last weekend, which I feel compelled to write about as Iain announced that all 4 of the participants were bloggers. Looking at my patchy pattern of updates I wasn't convinced that I qualified, but gaming has been infrequent over the last 6 weeks on account of events too numerous and tedious to outline!
We certainly didn't take 1825 at a gallop, it took almost 6 hours, but it never outstayed its welcome. The rules were surprisingly simple and the mechanics easy to grasp - but this was because Peter brilliantly distilled the rulebook, specially adapting it for the meanest understanding! I am led to believe the raw rules are definitely not for the faint hearted. Coping with the mechanics didn't present a problem, figuring out the best strategy certainly did. The shareholders of each railway could have been excused for being baffled at times by the antics of their directors! Everyone stuck gamely to the task though and an entertaining and challenging time was had by all. I would certainly play it again. It deserves a special award for having "Russet" tiles too. In an age of plastic figures, animeeples and extravagantly overproduced games, a simple Russet tile trumps them all!
Some of the book-keeping was fiddly in 1825, perhaps someone needs to design a web interface for such games that handles simple banking and record keeping tasks, players could access their details via their mobile phone browsers.
Other than 1825, and a few games of Race for the Galaxy (yet to overstay its welcome either) the only other gaming of note was an Epic Battlelore encounter constructed by Raphael using pretty much every Goblin and Dwarf available and then some extra humans. The goblins held on by virtue of 2 goblin bands enabling them to avoid panic, but it was quite a bloodbath. In the end it came down to the next player to claim a banner would triumph, so it had a nice close conclusion. I haven't made much progress on painting the figures though...
