Tree Weasel Weekly

Revised iPad App Recommendations

A burst of new iPad owners recently has led to me answering the same question. What are some good apps to get? These are ones that have stood the test of time for me. Of course the list of games is obviously skewed to my love of turn based games and aversion to twitch gaming. Still, there may be something of interest!

 Altered/new recommendations are in italics

 News/Social apps

 Instapaper - excellent offline reading tool

Twitterific (paid) or Twitter (free official app) for Twitter

Reeder is the best RSS reader I have found

Flipboard is also quite cool, as is Zito, in a new category of web magazines

Guardian Eyewitness is pretty nice eye-candy, featuring 1 photo each day from Guardian newsroom

WeatherProHD is the weather app I like best

 

Books and Documents

 There are a number of excellent PDF readers (PDF Expert, GoodReader or ReAddleDocs)

 As well as iBooks I would recommend downloading Bluefire Reader to cover all bases. The Kindle app is fine too. eBooks are my main use of the iPad (time-wise) and worthy of separate attention, both in choice of format and future-proofing, here are my recent thoughts.

 OmniOutliner for iPad (excellent list/outlining tool, well worth the money)

 Comics

 Comics by Comixology has a good selection of comics and a good browsing engine.

Graphic.ly, IDW, Dark Horse and Ave! Comics also have their own apps with good selections.

You might also get on with izneo BD which is French and has a large selection of French language comics.

(There is quite a lot of overlap and fragmentation in the comics market, if you like all things in one place you will find it frustrating)

 

Art/Photography apps

Artists Touch

Brushes

Colour Splash

Comic Life

PhotoForge2

Procreate

 

Reference/Coffee Table Apps

Articles (wikipedia front end)

The Elements

The Solar System

 

Musical programs

Garage Band

BeBot

Bloom HD

Galactica HD

Planetary (off beat interface to iPad music library)

 

Toys (don't really do anything but are fun to tinker with)

 Pottery HD

Annamika

Koi Pond HD

Uzu

Zen Bound 2

Tiny Tower

Pocket Frogs

Sand Pictures

 

Family/Co-Operative activities

The Ultimate Alphabet (really well done hidden object game)

Doodle Find Pro

Little Things

 

Strategy games

Plants vs Zombies HD (the definitive version)

Battleheart

Lego Harry Potter

I Dig It HD

100 Rogues

Civilisation Revolution

 

Touch-type games unique to iPad (or just really well suited)

Osmos HD

Sneezies HD

Steambirds HD

Spirits

Flight Control HD

Dungeon Raid

PuzzleQuest HD

Can Knockdown 2

World of Goo

Defender of the Oasis

Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint (odd but fun)

Casey's Contraptions

Coin Drop!

Tiny Wings

 

Then there is a long list of truly excellent board/card game conversions:

Carcassonne (excellent online asynchronous play)

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (excellent online too)

Disc Drivin'  (a wonderful Pitch Car style game, with excellent asynchronous online play)

Ticket to Ride (really well done)

Par-out Golf

Ghost Stories

Small World

Kingdoms

Medici

Battleline

Everlands HD

Samurai

Modern Art

Money

Ra

Reiner Knizia's Labyrinth

Hey, That's My Fish HD

Everlands HD

Kingsburg (iPhone)

Through The Desert

Neuroshima Hex

Army of Frogs HD

Roll Through the Ages (iPhone)

Tichu

 

Finally a few Action Type Games:

 Inifinity Blade

Reckless Racing HD

Ninjatown Trees of Doom

Linkoidz

Plunderland

 

That should keep you busy for a while

 

Adventures in a Post-PC world

The next release of iOS, the operating system for the iPod/iPad/iPhone devices, is heralded by Apple as ushering in the post-PC era. Nobody is really sure exactly what this means, but one key point (obviously) is the absence of a computer, using PC in the broadest sense. I have had occasion to sample this, having embarked on an experiment. Facing strong lobbying for a new computer from my son, and the observation from other quarters "that you shouldn't need a computer, you spend all your time on the iPad.", we decided to swap. I put my hard disk from my 2009 17" MacBook Pro into the aged late-2006 MacBook that Raphael had been using, and his disk into the MacBook Pro. Off we went into our respective corners to experiment with our "new" toys.

Unsurprisingly Raphael is pleased with the upgrade, after initially being a bit sniffy that it wasn't a brand new quad-core i7 turbo-nutter device. The big screen and extra CPU and RAM (8GB) over the older machine make a big difference, especially as he is actually writing software on it. But what of me. And why is this post-PC? After all I still have a PC, albeit a somewhat reduced one. Mostly the tasks that I have to use a PC for at the moment include media-management, I have 250+ GB of photos, movies, music, ebooks and audio-books, accumulated over the last 10 years. Even when iOS5 launches with iCloud and stuff, that isn't really going to help with that, and given the pitiful state of the BT Broadband connection to the house, attempting to manipulate that much data online would be a horrible thing to contemplate. None of the iPad solutions are any real help in managing large (27,000+) collections of photos either. Apart from media management, there are only some admin tasks, accounts and the odd letter, that I prefer to keep on the Mac. Still, not something that requires massive horsepower. So I thought I would give it a go.

For Mail, iTunes, Safari and eBook management the machine is fine, though a long way from snappy. It does work though, and was able to stream HD movie to Apple TV flawlessly (yes I know that is just shifting data, not decoding video, but it did manage it). I haven't tried ripping a DVD, and imagine that could make it struggle.badly. I know this because Aperture crucifies it. It takes minutes to load and has long periods of delay before it even manages to pop up a beach ball! I added 1GB of RAM at the weekend to take it to the maximum the machine can manage (3GB) and that improves things to the point that it now runs tolerably. As long as you are patient. But is isn't really a viable solution. Nor does iOS5/iCloud really make any dent in that particular problem for me. It could make things a lot worse if it decides to put every damn thing in the iCloud. That would be a real pain.

There is a bright spot though. Being a glutton for punishment I did install Lion 4 days into this experiment. Foolishly perhaps, since I can't really say if some of the poor performance is Lion-related, but it doesn't seem to impose a speed penalty. What it does offer on the small screen (remember I am downsizing from 1920*1200) is a very nice full-screen mode for Mail, Safari, and other applications that have been upgraded to support that. For Safari and Mail it works really, really well. The amount of screen space that it recovers is quite remarkable. For me this was worth the (very modest) price of admission. Lion has other improvements and changes, including a challenging new versionning mechanism for documents that attempts to do away with the "Save" option. Eek. A hard one to swallow for someone as wedded to the Save keyboard shortcut as me!

Well then, for anyone bored enough to read to the end, what is my conclusion? For anyone with a large collection of photos and/or music, iCloud isn't likely to be a panacea, or enable a truly PC-free existence. So, if you have to still use a PC, I think it needs to be a bit more grunty than a 5 year old MacBook, alas.

Wake up and smell the eBook

I am a hoarder. A collector. I used to collect books, but I ran out of space and had to curtail my purchasing. Then about 7 years ago I discovered eBooks! They are very easy to buy, and take up no space. I think you can imagine what has happened. Now ebooks are becoming mainstream and we start to see some tired old complaints trotted out – you can’t read them in the bath, they don’t smell nice etc. I don’t have a lot of time for these discussions really, but there are a couple of threads I would like to follow up on.

Virtual goods are not the same as their physical counterpart (obviously), and quite often are inferior in terms of an overall aesthetic package. Nobody who remembers LPs would compare the lavish artwork, sleeve notes and booklets many LPs contained with the anonymity of a MP3 “album”, which is often missing even the most basic accompanying material. eBooks are treated even worse, covers are often missing, they are formless, and of course they don’t smell right! But it doesn’t have to be like this.

What could we do to make ownership of digital material more tangible? The video game, Disgaea, has an interesting approach to in game items. Instead of a small list of generic stuff that you can buy or loot, every single item is unique. They even have creatures living in them (again unique) that you can quell or tame but that is getting even further off the track. Why am I even talking of this? Well, there is no reason that each eBook shouldn’t be unique as well. Of course the content of the eBook needs to be consistent, but what about a layer of meta-data that records unique information about the book? One of the nice things about most eBook formats is that the format itself already supports this type of information and the reading software can choose to ignore or act upon it as it sees fit.

What could be recorded in this meta-data? The user’s name and other simple items spring to mind as the most basic. Support for author signings/messages/personalised bookplates? This is not DRM by the way, just information to make the eBook more individual. Straightforward enough. But what about a meta-data layer defining decay? I used to be able to tell when my brother had read my books because the edges of the pages turned black! He worked in a machine shop and read during his breaks with oily fingers. Every time we read a paper book, it wears out slightly, pages fray, finger marks appear and so on. Completely pointless, but we could add similar aspects to eBooks so that they “suffer” some of the stresses of use, and this decay could be recorded in the ebook and displayed in the reader.

Of course all of these depend on the reading software to interpret and record the meta data in a meaningful way. And since eBooks don’t really have pages as such, perhaps not a workable idea. But many readers let users annotate and mark up books, so there is already support (of sorts) for making a book unique.

One other area that is ripe for exploitation is the library management on your reading device. I have an iPad, and it, and other tablets, are no slouches when it comes to pushing pixels around. So why do we have flat shelves with 2D “books” lined up in rigid lines? Lets go to town here. Have a 3D (or even 2.5D) representation of a book, so that it resembles its physical counterpart, with varying height and thickness. Why not a 3D library environment with shelves, ladders, dust, cobwebs, and orang-utans. OK, maybe not orang-utans. I am not suggesting we licence the Unreal engine and produce an amazing 3D library (though that would be kind of neat) but simply something that emphasised the differences each book has, and gave us different ways to arrange and manipulate our library. Total gloss and frippery perhaps, but as a virtual collection grows, it is nice to be able to visualise and interact with it in different ways. There are several apps that attempt to do this with music, including Planetary, which represents your music collection as a solar system. Daft? Yes, but shows a bit of thinking beyond the rigid lists and collections that make up the building blocks of a software developers normal toolkit. Another app, Albums, shows your music as CD covers and lets you pile them up on a virtual table and shuffle them around.

Anyway – enough of me. Just a bit of a rambling discourse on making ebooks decay, wear out, and look individual.  But not smell. You can’t do that with meta-data or the Unreal engine. Yet.

 

 

CIV V FTW

With a little bit of free time over the consecutive 4 day weekends I dug up Civ V for another look and found that its grip on my brain is as strong as ever. In fact as I thought about it, I think it transcends its predecessors in every way. Of course each iteration is an improvement, but usually there are some aspects of the new version that don't quite work as well, leading to hankering for the "old ways". But Civ V leaves Civ IV and III in the dust (and neither were that shabby).

So what are some of the improvements? The one I like best is the new structure of Social Policies which replace the Government & Religion from Civ IV. In place of Democracy, Republic etc. there is a set of ten policy "trees" that you can apply Culture points to, and that provide much finer grained control over the direction your civilisation takes. The trees are researched in a similar way to technology, but use Culture points (which are granted by a variety of City Improvements) and some trees are mutually exclusive. This is the single most important leap forward for me, each game will take you down a subtly different route.

Great People still appear, but the rules governing their appearance are more transparent and the range of things that you can do with them more varied. Another major change is to a Hex map, and this is a big plus for me as well. Movement, Zones of Control and City Placement get an extra layer of depth without complexity. In fact although there are some significant additions, the complexity is nicely layered into the game structures and doesn't overwhelm.

Another nice addition is the City State, autonomous cities that don't expand, but befriending (or conquering) them can be beneficial. The Diplomacy options are broadly familiar, but adding in the City States and their alliances is effective. You do have to be careful. Attacking a single City State could lead to a world war as cascading defence pacts and alliances drag in other nations.
Civ IV at times seemed to play itself, sure you could intervene, but on the whole that just led to a whole world of bewilderment, and worry that a whole lot was going on under the hood that was influencing the game, and that you should really try to figure it out, but all you really wanted to do was get on with things! In Civ V there is still a lot that happens under the hood, but it is somehow a bit more accessible.

I am sure that there are numerous resources on the web that describe the changes. As a Civ veteran since the original Civilisation on PC I am hugely impressed with the glorious progression that is Civ V. As I mentioned before, I haven't got the slightest inclination to revisit Civ IV. The fact that Civ V is available under Steam on the Mac helps a lot too.

Epic Mashups

It was only a few years ago that some clever chaps dreamed up the incredibly unlikely marriage of match-3 puzzle mechanics (as in Bejeweled) and a RPG framework – and PuzzleQuest was born. This mashup turned out to be a stroke of genius and the game has since made its way onto most computing platforms and games consoles. I have played it on DS, PSP and iPad, and it still remains a blast. A few worthy successors, albeit with very different mechanics have emerged since to further tantalise.

Last year I got heavily involved with Sword+Poker, a deceptively simple dungeon crawl using a Poker like mechanism to resolve combat. The RPG element was thinner than PQ, but being pared down to the essentials was fine, especially as the “story” in PQ was pretty daft. The spells and skills unfolded nicely in Sword+Poker, and the difficulty curve was nicely balanced. One thing that both games got right was that failure was not punished severely. Losing a combat was a setback, but you didn’t lose saved progress and actually got to keep a few things obtained in the fight. This ensured that every time you spent some time with the game you advanced your cause a tiny bit, a subtle psychological boost to keep you engaged.

Much more unforgiving, but equally compelling is Dungeon Raid. This marries a rogue-like dungeon crawl to a path tracing match-3 mechanism. Rogue like games have always been a huge favourite of mine, but the pure rogue/Nethack game doesn’t translate so well on a touch screen. The Dungeon Raid developers replace it with a simple touch mechanism that hides a game engine of considerable depth. After a (relatively) leisurely first few turns you will find yourself having to make tricky decisions on how to tackle the evolving situation, what skills to acquire, how to balance health/armour/damage etc. The acid test of any turn-based game, whether board or computer is what decisions must you make and what value are they to your progress. Too trivial, or too obvious and the game is boring, but if the choices are hard then interest is maintained. Dungeon Raid falls in between to some degree, because the choices are frequent small ones (usually obvious) but punctuated with tougher ones that can make the difference between sudden death and just hanging in there. If you are a fan of puzzle/RPG/rogue mashups and you haven’t got Dungeon Raid yet, what are you waiting for?




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I for one, salute my new asynchronous overlords!

There have been numerous board game conversions for iOS, many of them excellent. In general to have any longevity they need to provide a convincing AI (and attendant progress/achievement logging for extra motivation) or online opponents. One of the unexpected successes for me early on was Carcassonne, a board game which had passed its sell by date, burdened down with a surfeit of expansions. In its iOS incarnation it was not only really well implemented with a crisp attractive interface, but it used the iOS notification framework to provide asynchronous play seamlessly. The game itself supports that perfectly as each player’s turn is isolated from the others, and contains no direct interaction. I have played 78 games over the last year, while the physical game languishes in the cupboard.

More recently the brilliant Disc Drivin’ – a game inspired by Pitchcars (probably) has utilised this play model to great effect. On your turn you slide a disc along a track, avoiding obstacles, making use of booster pads or jumps, and periodically using special power-ups as your power-gauge gets charged up. The async model works perfectly here and the game itself exploits the touch interface to provide a very satisfactory and compelling experience, even if it can be frustrating at times when you continually hurl your disk into the abyss.

Samurai by Reiner Knizia allegedly has a good async mode, but I have singularly failed to connect up with anyone on that!

Other board games can have their moment in the sun by providing some reason to keep hammering the AI – I spent quite a while chasing down achievements in “Kingsburg – Serving the Crown”. When this framework is missing, there often isn’t a reason to return to a game.

Some games, of course, don’t support disconnected gameplay quite so well, most card games need the pace of play to be quick-fire, and ones involving trading (Settlers ofCatan for instance) or any interrupt mechanism (where players can perform actions in the midst of other players turns). Still the selection is impressively large already and with old favourites like Euphrates & Tigris, Puerto Rico in the wings there will be plenty of new stuff to choose from.

I wonder if anyone is working on War of the Ring for tablets? After my abject pounding at the weekend it might be nice to have a compliant AI to hammer.






- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Vexed What-eReader-should-I-buy question

Some time around the turn of the century I got a PDA, one of the first Compaq iPAQs. It was a chunky beast, but pretty versatile, and a new dawn of mobile PDA-ing, gaming, music and other converged joys awaited. I quickly discovered 2 truths, one was that most of the games available fell into the diverting category, i.e. fine for a few minutes, but not compelling. The second was that even if there was a Pokemon/Final Fantasy Tactics game of great depth it would fall behind compared to a good book. Curiously, almost 10 years later, and now wielding a mobile device of unimaginable power and sophistication compared to the iPaq, I find these truths largely hold true still. The games on the iPad do transcend “diverting”, for sure, but they still can’t compete with eBooks!

I am now frequently asked to recommend eReader/eBooks and this is actually a very difficult question to answer. It really requires one of the flowcharts that XKCD do such a good job of. Alas, I am not in their league. Still there are a couple of key questions to ask that can get you a long way towards making a decision (or a long way further off as well).

A caveat. I am assuming that you want to buy ebooks – if you want to steal them then none of this matters, since you can steal them to suit your device of choice. Sadly, life is easier for the thieves, curse them. 90% of the complexity and length of this post is because of DRM making it awkward for paying customers. I dearly wish this wasn’t the case.

First question is, do you care about being able to re-read books in the future, or transfer them to different devices? This informs the second question, which is the choice of eReader device i.e.

• Dedicated eReader (Kindle, Kobo, Sony etc.)


• Smartphone (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile)


• Tablet (err, IPad really)

Armed with the answers to those questions we can make some progress.If you really don’t care about future re-reads, or transferability of books, then I can point you to Kindle, regardless of choice of device, since the Kindle reader is everywhere! I can’t recommend anything else, alas, as the DRM infrastructure for ePub is tricky and far from transparent.

At this point I will assume that you have some interest in the longevity of your ebooks, and want to exercise some control over them. Apart from a few noble exceptions most books are sold with Digital Rights Management (DRM) that prevents any such thing. In order to take control of your purchases you have to strip that off, a task that isn’t terribly tricky, but is probably illegal.

A brief word of history here, the first book format I purchased was Microsoft Reader, which had DRM baked into the reader software and was based on device activation – by far the most unreliable and plain stupid form of DRM. After a couple of device changes I was locked out of my books and had to beg Microsoft to gain access to them. That (and several company bankruptcies) convinced me that I would only buy ebooks when I knew that I could disable the DRM. Publishers take note: my 3 huge spending sprees on eBooks coincided with discovering how to remove DRM from PDB (Palm eReader), ePUB (Adobe Adept) and Kindle ebooks. At present tools to remove DRM from iBooks don’t exist (probably because sales are too low for anyone to care) so I haven’t bought anything from the iBookStore.

Anyway, tools do exist to remove DRM, so that you can “steal” the books that you have bought. They tend to move about as people get cold feet about hosting them, but they have got simpler to use, especially on the Mac where some kind individual wrapped them up in a nice AppleScript bundle. It still isn’t straightforward enough to recommend to non-technical types though. Once you have removed the DRM then your book is just a file and you can read it on any device that supports that format, or convert it with something like Calibre.

You are now ready to choose a device, if you have persisted this long. Most people will have given up and taken the path of least resistance and gone for being locked into a single vendor. This will work for the short term, but at the expense of probable future pain.

Device selection is actually simpler.

Smartphones have a small selection of eBook readers that handle most formats, even if you are stuck with DRM eBooks. The small screen size is not ideal of course, but you do have the virtue of having the device with you all the time. The Kindle and iBooks apps also sync your location in your books so that you can read on phone and switch to a device with a bigger screen when it suits. If you have a smart phone, Kindle, iBooks, Bluefire Reader, Aldiko and Kobo are good places to start.

The choice between dedicated readers like Kindle, Sony etc. or a general tablet device like iPad is one of portability against flexibility. I am going to ignore the squalid squabbles about eInk vs. LCD displays that get people all excited. Just note that if you get eInk device you will need a light to read in the dark, but your experience in full sunlight is better. If either of those reading scenarios (bed or desert sands) is your main location then choose accordingly. Otherwise a tablet like iPad offers extreme flexibility in choice of reading software, even more so if you have stripped the DRM (and of course has a wide range of other software to do other exciting stuff). It is much bigger than Kindle/Sony etc for every day use as a reader though, which is where those devices edge ahead. The disadvantage to a dedicated device is that it will typically only read its own format of books, whether bought from their own store or sideloaded by yourself.

Executive Summary

If you are not too fussed at the moment about ebook longevity or portability, get a Kindle, or get the Kindle app on your smartphone or tablet.

If you do wish to future proof your purchases you need to strip the DRM off, or just buy from DRM-free vendors. In either case a smartphone or tablet will give you the most flexibility in reading your books (especially as you probably own one of these already).

So – a long rambling post that probably confuses rather than informs.

A short list of people supplying DRM free eBooks

Angry Robot Books
Baen
Book View Café

There are several others, but I am losing the will to live with this iPad Blog posting s/w, so will amend later...

IPad Essential Apps (CTD edition)

A burst of new iPad owners recently has led to me answering the same question. What are some good apps to get? These are ones that have stood the test of time for me. Of course the list of games is obviously skewed to my love of turn based games and aversion to twitch gaming. Still, there may be something of interest!

News/Social apps

Instapaper - excellent offline reading tool
Twitter (of course), or Twitterific if you don't want the offical app
Reeder is the best RSS reader I have found
Flipboard is also quite cool, as is Zito, in a new category of web magazines

There are a number of excellent PDF readers (GoodReader, ReAddleDocs)

As well as iBooks I would recommend downloading Bluefire Reader to cover all bases. The Kindle app is fine too. eBooks are my main use of the iPad (time-wise) and worthy of separate attention, both in choice of format and future-proofing. You will have to ask me...

Guardian Eyewitness is pretty nice eye-candy

WeatherProHD is the weather app I like best

Comics by Comixology has a good selection of comics and a good browsing engine.
You might also get on with izneo BD which is French and has a large selection of French language comics

Art/Photography apps:
Artists Touch
Brushes
Colour Splash

Reference/Coffee Table Apps:
Articles (wikipedia front end)
The Elements
The Solar System

Musical programs
Garage Band
BeBot
Bloom HD
Galactica HD

Toys (don't really do anything but are fun to tinker with)

Pottery HD
Annamika
Koi Pond HD
Uzu
Zen Bound 2

Family/Co-Operative activities
The Ultimate Alphabet (really well done hidden object game)
Doodle Find Pro
Little Things

Strategy games
Plants vs Zombies HD (the definitive version)
Battleheart
Lego Harry Potter
I Dig It HD
100 Rogues
Civilisation Revolution

Touch-type games unique to iPad (or just really well suited)
Osmos HD
Sneezies HD
Steambirds HD
Spirits
Flight Control HD
Dungeon Raid
PuzzleQuest HD
Can Knockdown 2
World of Goo
Defender of the Oasis

Then there is a long list of truly excellent board/card game conversions:

Carcassonne
Small World
Kingdoms
Medici
Battleline
Everlands HD
Samurai
Money
Ra
Reiner Knizia's Labyrinth
Honey that's Mine
Everlands HD
Disc Drivin'
Kingsburg (iPhone)
Through The Desert
Neuroshima Hex
Roll Through the Ages (iPhone)
Tichu

Finally a few Action Type Games:

Inifinity Blade
Reckless Racing HD
Ninjatown Trees of Doom
Linkoidz
Plunderland

That should keep you busy for a while

Wave

I wrote this in a Wave, while trying out Google Wave. It occurred to me that I could cross post it here, and at least (temporarily) revive this moribund site. Twitter has taken over for me...

Top iPhone Apps

since getting the iPhone many apps have come and gone from my device (mostly games) but the following have stuck and are used most days.

Essential

• eReader/Stanza (eBooks are easily the most important use of my iPhone)
• eWallet
• Bento (not wholly convinced by this, but Ilium are slow with ListPro for iPhone)
• Remember the Milk
• Tweetie
• Weather Pro
• iPod (yes, it plays music too)
• Settings (to toggle Airplane mode on/off to try to restore connectivity to O2's wretched network)

Second Tier (used often)

• iDisk
• Remote
• Tube Deluxe
• NetNewsWire (better now it uses Google Reader)
• Score
• Safari (hey you can access teh internetz too)

Games (still in the diverting category, no Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics or Pokemon for iPhone, so nothing that calls out again and again to be played. Puzzle Quest should have been a killer app but was very poorly done. This list is therefore current favourites and will be different next week)

• Ramp Champ
• Dungeon Hunter
• The Isle of 8 Bit Treasures (could be a keeper)
• Monumental
• Button Men
• Peggle (until I lost all my progress when resetting iPhone to factory settings) 

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...

Again, Again

5 of us got together to give a thorough workout to the splendid Fimo resources for Agricola that I acquired in the recent EU Maths Trade. It was also the first 5 player game of Agricola that we had tried. Two people had not played before, and suffered the usual anguish of figuring out what on earth they should be doing in the first few rounds. The underlying rule set is remarkably simple though, as the rules were not needed at all during the game, except at the end to figure out what to do in the event of a tie! It took around 2.5 hours to complete, slightly extended for explanations I guess. However it never dragged, you always had something to do, watching the available actions, cursing your neighbour for taking the action you had planned, and trying to figure out how to progress without starving. The performance of the newcomers varied, Tully built a subsistence grain farming enterprise that kept his family alive, but fell apart in the final scoring for lack of variety. Duncan made a late bid for glory with an impressive collection of animals and did better. Significantly both were keen to play again (phew).

In 2 and 3 player games we have hardly ever kept animals in the farmhouse, but pretty much everyone had a pet at some stage in last nights game. Being the last player to go can leave you with slim pickings indeed, and grabbing a creature was sometimes the only sensible thing to do. The new resources look simply wonderful, I have played several 2 player games with them as well and they have stood up to the punishment pretty well. I remain keen to play this at every opportunity and that is with just the "E" deck translated. When the additional decks come into play there will be further variety and interest. Hopefully the official English cards will be available soon.

A few games other than Agricola have been played. Iain has reported on Breaking Away in detail, it was a big surprise. The game mechanics reflected the theme astonishingly well, for what on the surface looks like a dry number cruncher. It was very enjoyable, as was Through the Desert afterwards (always reliable).

I need a bigger box

I have already defied the laws of physics cramming the additional laminated English pasted up cards into my Agricola box. Now I have obtained a full set of resources made in Fimo from a BoardgameGeek Maths Trade. It is fast approaching a record for the most customised game in my cupboard. Shortly I hope to add the English cards from the official English release. I will need a wheely bag to move it all around in.

Not a lot of actual gaming to report, events conspire against me. I did take part in Iain's less than successful introduction of Black Vienna. I wasn't so upset at the way it played out, probably because my annotation system was flaky from the start and I knew I was on a hiding to nothing fairly quickly. I did have 1 of the spies detected early on, then crossed it out.

In a spot of Patapon news I managed to convince Raphael to get my chaps through the desert and I have made good progress since then, though I am still woefully bad at the mini-games that give you additional resources. Penny Arcade sum up the attraction nicely " I had to play Patapon for quite awhile before I figured out why I didn't like it, and then I had to be quite sure I didn't, and then I had to play it some more for some reason I don't entirely understand".

Agricritters

The enthusiasm to build our own Agricola farmers subsided somewhat, as reality set in. The reality being that it was quite hard to do (well) and the resulting figures tended to be on the fragile side - not up to being stuffed into the box with all the other components certainly. However, while fossicking around in the games cupboard I came across a tin containing plastic figures from Kellogs cereal packets way back around 1970. These were the cause of much sibling rivalry at the time, each trying to collect the full set, amidst crys of "Unfair" and "I wanted that one". Anyway, some of these have survived the intervening 38 years and are nicely colour coded to match the Agricola player colours. So we have a fetching set of Purple Crater Critters, some Green Vegetable Sports and Orange Neptunes Orchestra. I played a game with them, with much resulting damage to the overall theme! The Crater Critters triumphed over the Vegetable Sports, showing that invaders from the Moon in the 14th Century were probably better at farming than the local peasants. Possibly.

Later I looked up on the great Interweb to see if I actually had a complete set of Crater Critters only to discover that these are now quite collectable, and sell for large sums. Well, large sums for something that was given away in cereal packets anyway. So we had actually been playing with valuable antiques. Who would have known!

We have played quite a few games of Race for the Galaxy and are starting to get a feel for the card set and the various ways to win. It is enjoyable, and very quick to play, but doesn't call out to me to play in the way that Agricola does. For something that can be played in under half an hour it is great though - while someone else sets up Agricola!

Meanwhile on the PSP a wonderful game called Patapon has been released. Featuring truly distinctive and eye catching visual design by the French artist, Rolito, and detailed gameplay on several levels it should be the perfect game to follow on after Disgaea. The Patapons are charmingly animated and your army of Patapons can be customised to a considerable degree with many different types and class of unit. The basic gameplay involves beating a chant on a series of drums, pausing for your Patapon army to echo the chant and perform the action associated with the drumbeat, then beating a new command. If you manage to follow the beat well after a few turns they will enter Fever mode where they are more effective in their actions. If you miss a beat or beat an unknown command the Patapons stop in confusion, bumping into each other and complaining. This can be fatal if there is a dangerous enemy in your midst. And therein lies the problem - I am completely rubbish at the game. I fail to keep the beat, I rarely achieve Fever mode and I can just about scrape through the first half dozen missions, before coming to a complete stop. My Patapons have to cross a desert, which requires mastery of Fever mode, so I am stuck. Normally when I reach a wall in a game I will just stop playing because if it is too difficult it is also possible that the rest of the game doesn't appeal to me either. But in this case I really, really want to progress because I have barely scratched the surface of all the units, items and areas to unlock and explore - and the game is so delightfully presented. I know I am doomed however, when my son, a professional musician (sort of) exclaims as he crosses the desert, "Gosh, this is hard". Perhaps I will get him to cross the desert for me...