My 8 favourite Magic: the Gathering cards of all time

I've been playing Magic on and off since Revised (3rd Edition) and though I haven't played too much recently, I thought this list would be fun to compile. This list has nothing to do with how good the card is. They're all just based on my appreciation of their design and mostly how good it feels to play that particular card. I think it's noteworthy that I don't have any white cards on this list. I don't know what this says about me.


#8 Budoka Gardener/Dokai, Weaver of Life

This card sadly never really made it into competitive, but the idea of it was so cool. It was in the first cycle of transformation cards, which was a neat idea to begin with. Add to it the idea of a humble monk leveling up to become this badass that summons elementals, and the 10 year old within me that was first learning about AD&D and 18th level monks leaped with joy. I tried very hard to make a good deck around this card, but it just wasn't good enough. Eventually I ended up with a Budoka Gardener deck with no Budokas. Cards like this did pave the way for cards that would be good in the future (see: Huntmaster of the Fells), though.

#7 Fires of Yavimaya

The Fires deck that rocked the scene during the IPA block, arguably the best block ever, was incredibly fun. It had all the aggro power of weenie decks except you were still playing giant, cost efficient beasts. If memory serves, control decks like Eternal Slide dominated Standard before this came along. While I appreciate what this card does in terms of speeding up a game and making things more intense, what I really like is that the card successfully designs around the enchantment card disadvantage so that it can be used successfully in aggro decks. The Haste effect means you could take advantage of the enchantment immediately, and the secondary effect was versatile enough that opponents often couldn't destroy it for free or you could get that little bit of extra reach out of it. It was one of the most well designed enchantments pre-Bestow and the enchantments with CIP effects.

#6 Eternal Witness

Fantastic art and card advantage for green! Back in the day, before we had Masked Admirers, green wizards took whatever card advantage they could get their hands on, and one of the best was Eternal Witness. I just love the feeling that as long as you had one Eternal Witness left in hand, it didn't matter how many others were killed. You could do a Witness chain party! Between Jehovah's Witness and Eternal Witness, I know which one I would choose.

#5 Fact or Fiction

I love this card. Not only is it a powerful card, but the design of this card capitalizes on what makes games great. Games are about making choices, and Fact or Fiction forces choices on both players. And not only that, it creates a direct player vs. player interaction, while most other cards only forces card interactions. It's as if the two players set the real game aside and play a subtle mini-game, the impact of which may not be realized immediately. The variety provided by the randomness of Fact or Fiction and the fact that it came first puts it above the (probably) more powerful Gifts Ungiven for me.


#4 Grab the Reins

Talk about a card that feels fun to play, Grab the Reins pretty much takes the cake. It's an active card, it's an instant, and it uniquely solved problems in its Standard format, such as Kokusho. It was flexible for a lower cost if you were in a pinch, but if you hit the heavy 7 mana Entwine cost, then it was an Act of Treason and Fling in one card. And Fling was a really fun card. Go ahead and imagine throwing a dragon at someone's face. Now imagine if it was their dragon. Delicious.


#3 Braids, Cabal Minion

Talk about an interesting card. Braids was a card that instantly kicked my imagination into high gear with all the possible ways you could have it lock a game down. Your opponent would be the first to sacrifice something, so even if they killed her with burn, it would be a 2 for 1. That's good, right? Well, turns out, she may not be the best, but it is still fun. A first turn Dark Ritual into Braids is sometimes just a scoop. And she's crazy! I don't know why I find that flavour appealing.

#2 Goblin Charbelcher

Speaking of crazy, this card is so crazy and fun that it has spawned completely insane decks that have as few as 2 lands. Even in more normal decks though, the card is a fun cannon on every activation. No game is out of reach when you can activate it since the one shot dream is always possible. Paying the mana feels like putting a coin in a slot machine, and every card you turn up feels like rolling a die. I love this card. It is designed for maximum fun.

#1 Serendib Efreet

Don't ask me to justify my love for the Revised Serendib Efreet. It's a cost effective flyer with a self-hurting mechanic, but more than that, it had an erroneous green border back in the days when I first started playing. This is just one of those "heart" picks since I won a Magic tournament at my high school with some turn 2 Serendib Efreet + Unstable Mutation wackiness (my prize was Underworld Dreams!). It is also out of range of Lightning Bolt which was very relevant at that time. I just thought that a 6/7 flyer beating your face on turn 3 was just so awesome. Hypnotic Specters get out of the way!

The eSports trash talk dilemma

Recently there has been some drama regarding disrespect of players, and maybe even players of a certain country or region in the professional Dota 2 scene. The teams involved were EG and paiN. The reddit posts can be found here:

EG vs PaiN - Disrespectful behavior from PPD toward BR players (context on comments)

Will jD MLG League take any action against EG.PPD?

Just to provide some extra context, MLG has put EG into North American qualifiers despite EG's reputation and track record as the uncontested champion of the North American Dota 2. PPD has personally posted his feelings that this takes away from the lesser skilled teams that might need the chance to qualify, as well as implying that it was a waste of EG's time (source).

It is hard to argue that the content of PPD's messages were disrespectful. But in the context of eSports as a competitive sport, is this really different than what's being said on the ice, court, or field? Commentators in hockey tell anecdotes of superstars saying "Who are you again?" to lesser bench players as they are competing, and it is seen as playful or amusing. We expect our pro players to have a competitive spirit, and sometimes that means they will say things to each other. The fact that it can be recorded and displayed in PPD's arena versus Michael Jordan's is the only difference here.

As another example, at the weigh ins for professional fights in sports such as boxing or MMA, people trash talk all the time. The press love it, the fans love it or love to hate it, and everyone wins.

In addition, the implication that PPD was disrespectful to Brazilians because they are Brazilians or toward all Brazilians from the title of the first reddit post is unfounded from the image. There is absolutely no evidence of that at all, and I believe PPD would say what he said to any low tier team.

However, my initial reaction was that he was a jerk and he should not have said those things when I first read them. Why? It's partly because that we all love an underdog story, and PPD played the role of the big bully that was trying to keep the small guys down. It's a position Hollywood has trained us to identify and has trained us to hate the aggressor. If PPD said this to C9's EternalEnvy, no one would care. It would be seen as competitive banter between two nearly equally matched teams. But because paiN is still a second tier team, it was like berating a puppy who's just trying its best.

So here is the corner we've run into: Is it more disrespectful for PPD to say these things, or to treat them specially, as if they weren't equals? In paiN's manager PAADA's response in the reddit thread, he mentions that he wants his team to be "treated with respect and professionalism." To me, that means EG should be trying to leverage every advantage possible to win the game they are paid to play (and win). Whether that's pressuring admins to play on their preferred server, or trash talking to get opponents off their game, that is the kind of professionalism shown in other sports. And as for respect, as I've mentioned, I believe it is more disrespectful for them to not try to get every advantage and to not treat paiN as he would have treated other top tier teams.

So what is the problem? One problem redditors are bringing up is that there is a rule against disrespect toward other players are admins. Though there is a similar rule in pretty much all tournaments and leagues, it is rarely enforced. It is there just in case someone gets really out of hand, but it is not something anyone wants to enforce. If it does get enforced strongly, you get something like the Korean StarCraft scene, where the players are seen as faceless and lacking in personality. Personally, as much as I like StarCraft, I prefer the variety in the Dota 2 scene any day. If you want mild mannered and nice, you have Aui and Universe. If you have salty, you have PPD.

Another worry is that rude pros will inspire the community to be rude. But let's face it - the community will always be rude because it is on the Internet. Role models are not going to help that. Only the community can fix that, so let's not put that mission on our young talent. Let our players show us how to compete and how to win at a game we love, and work on being decent human beings on our own.

Finally, there was some discontent shown by some redditors that EG was using their high profile or status to get special treatment or to pressure the admins into making a decision in their favour. And I think that's totally fine. Fair? Maybe not. But again, it is done in sports. How many times do you see a player or coach yelling at a referee so that they will get a more favourable call next time? So again I would argue that it is in fact their duty as players who should want to win so badly that they do everything within the rules to win, even if it makes them look like villains. That is why I admire EternalEnvy. He will bother whoever he has to bother, and complain about any negative conditions, no matter how slight, if it even remotely increases his chance of winning. To me, that is the definition of a professional. Do lawyers worry about sportsmanship? They will do whatever it takes to get the job done.

In the end, it seems to me EG and PPD have done nothing wrong. They are not responsible for the history of disrespect, real or perceived on the part of paiN. I am sure bad things have happened to them and I don't think that should be happening, but this incident is not one of them. paiN should try their best to get favourable conditions for themselves. Other team should do so as well, and admins should have to make hard decisions. Otherwise, no one is taking their profession seriously enough.

How to start winning in Heroes of the Storm: A guide for beginners

As HotS (Heroes of the Storm, not to be confused with Heart of the Swarm) is getting more popular, I thought I'd write down what I have learned the hard way to help players getting into HotS find success more quickly. This is intended for people who have played  a couple of games of HotS already as I'm not going to explain most of the terms. The game is deeper than it looks, and coming from Dota 2 I've had an advantage, but it took me about 10 games before I really started winning regularly. In this article I will cover the basic strategy that should work for public games without getting into map specifics, but the maps really do affect what you will want to do.

Goals of the game

There are only two resources in the game: experience and map control. This is simplified from the classic Dota model of having gold as well, but understand that in this game, everything you do needs to work toward one of these two goals if you want to win the game.

At the beginning of the game, map control is very hard to obtain, so experience is your priority. You need to have at least 1 person in each lane to get experience from the minions that are dying so you don't fall behind. You only need to be near the creeps, so if you're alone in lane, play conservatively and try not to get harassed. You should, in general, try to get objectives, such as the Tribute, even if they cost you a bit of experience, because that will lead to map control, which is the more important of the two objectives. However, getting as much experience as you can to get to level 10 before your opponent is generally the early goal of the game. Experience takes more and more of a backseat in terms of importance as it gets later in the game. You will notice that it's really, really hard to be up by more than a level over your opponent later in the game since it requires so much experience to reach the next level. So what this means is that once you hit level 10, your team should group up pretty much all the time.

This is not an excuse to not help your team in the early game. In public games, sometimes your teammates will group up and fight all the time. If you don't help them, they will give up a bunch of kills and experience so all the experience you worked to gain by staying in lane won't matter, and your teammates will hate you. So if your team is being stubborn, it's okay to group up with them earlier, though this is less than optimal since early kills usually put you behind in experience if you don't have people in the lanes.

So the lesson with experience is to not worry about kills early. They don't give much experience compared to the minions, and whoever you kill will come back with full health and mana in a couple of seconds while you won't have full health and mana.

Map control is the most important thing about the game. This involves doing damage and taking the opponent's buildings, especially their Forts and Keeps. Not only do killing these buildings give your team a boost in experience, it makes it so that lane is always pushing into them and they constantly have to deal with it. This means you are free to take all the mercenaries and objectives on the map. Then eventually you can either just go directly to kill the core along with a mercenary, or try to win a team fight and kill the core while they are respawning. So unlike Dota, where keeping the lane back in the early game is important, in HotS you should always be trying to push the lane and dealing damage to their buildings as much as possible. Use your AOE abilities to keep the creep waves away from your towers and pushing into theirs.

A common pitfall I see with my teammates is that they are very focused on taking all the mercenary camps on the map without pushing along with them. Remember, the point of taking mercenaries is to get map control, and if you just leave them to push alone they will usually just be killed without giving you any (later in the game). That means you just wasted your time to do nothing. So unless you're pushing some other lane so that they don't have time to deal with the mercenaries, or you're pushing with the mercenaries yourself, it is not great to be taking mercenaries. There are a lot of games where my team could have won by just pushing with alongside a Grave Golem, but some teammates want to  go take other camps instead. This is a no no and you should encourage your teammates to push with the mercenaries.

You can of course use the mercenaries as a distraction so that the enemy has to choose between losing their buildings or losing a map objective. This is great if you time it well and a perfect illustration of taking a mercenary in order to obtain map control.

Another more subtle way of evaluating map control is how much mana and health you have. Use your Moonwells liberally to keep yourself topped up, especially when a map objective is about to appear. Don't be afraid of using your hearthstone to go back to base to fill up. In this game, "winning the lane" is essentially the difference between your health and mana vs. your opponent's at the time of an objective spawning. So try to bully them off the regeneration orbs, getting to use even one extra ability in the fight can turn the fight!

What to do in a team fight

For MOBA veterans, this section will not be news. For newer players of the genre, read on!

Engagements will happen and are inevitable, so what are some general guidelines you should follow? First, you are squishier than you think. If you need to be chasing someone while a teamfight is still going on around you, it is probably not worth it unless the hero is super high value such as a Nova or Hammer, and even then you need to make sure you get the kill because you are probably going to die. So the best way to approach a fight is to dance around. Use some abilities, and then if people are focusing damage on you, run away, wait for your abilities to come back up, and use them again. Remember that your teammates are all dealing damage while they're chasing you around, and they will likely overchase. Another way to look at it is that you are forcing the enemy to make more decisions in the heat of the moment: If you just run straight at them, their decision is easy, they will just simply kill you. If they start attacking you and you run immediately, they now have to decide if they want to pour more resources into chasing you, if they can even kill you if they do, who to target next if they are going to switch targets, etc.

Second, your positioning is everything, especially with assassin heroes. Never go in before your warriors/tanks, and sometimes just wait out an ability or two from the enemy before jumping in and unloading your fury. I see a lot of Zeratuls racking up the deaths because they go in too early or don't blink out right away. Don't stand beside other heroes so that AOE abilities will catch more than one of you. And always have an escape plan if you go in. With heroes like Valla, that means saving a Vault.

And that's all folks!

Just with these few pointers, you should be well on your way to winning a decent number of HotS games. There are more advanced strategies of course, and map specific exceptions, but you will have plenty of time to learn those. Pick a hero, learn the intricacies of their skills and talents, and pay attention to what kills you. And most importantly, support your team and have fun! HotS is a heavy team fighting game, so if you're alone, you're most likely doing it wrong.

Dissatisfied with the Bureaucracy

XCOM: Enemy Unknown was my favourite game of 2012. You had to play carefully, it had the Civilizations style hooks with technology, buildings, and economy management, it had all the tactical RPG fun of leveling up and buying stuff, and best of all - it was hard. Possibly the only knock against the game was that there wasn't quite enough of it.

So what is the next logical step for the franchise? Turning it into a shooter, of course! I really don't know when this trend started, where everything had to be turned into a shooter. Blizzard tried this with the thankfully canned StarCraft: Ghost, and from The Bureaue: XCOM Declassified trailer, I'm pretty disappointed with the direction it has taken.

It does seem to promise the RPG goodies you'd expect, and I can see the argument that turning it into a shooter will reduce the randomness of it, but I enjoyed the random chances. I missed out on the previous games in the franchise, but the dice rolling and maximizing your chances while minimizing your enemy's chances were a big and enjoyable part of Enemy Unknown. Not to mention I prefer an isometric perspective in strategy games so that I can get the full sense of what's going on.

I have to admit, the part where they place a turret and then lift it with telekinesis to shoot enemies in cover looked pretty cool. But to me it's as if they made another sequel to the Silence of the Lambs and turned it into an action movie. I'm all for shooters, but I don't understand why this had to be an XCOM game. I guess I'll have to wait and see how the more faithful Xenonauts turns out.

This is your brain on Scrolls

Victory! I have successfully avoided buying anything during the vile temptress that is the Steam Summer Sale. Sure, I bought the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition right before it started, but I still hold a technical victory.

If you haven't heard of or played Scrolls, it's a CCG kind of like Magic: The Gathering, but with a small board. Other people have done much better jobs than I can in explaining or demonstrating what Scrolls is all about, so I invite you to watch TotalBiscuit's intro.

I've played quite a few online games, and what makes Scrolls such a great game (aside from the game itself, which is fairly strategic) is the community. Sure you'll always have your internet trolls, but in general Scrolls has been quite a pleasant environment (shoutout to the Reddit community in particular). The game is still in beta so a lot of features are missing, but people in the community have really stepped up to keep things fun and interesting. A group of people have even donated real money in order to run a tournament with real prizes for the top players!

Compared to the Dota communities (Dota 2, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth), the maturity level in Scrolls is fairly high. The game is such a great deal right now at $21, and was a large help in my aforementioned resistance against the Steam Summer Sale.

In much darker news though, the Leafs have made a series of crazy moves that will probably send us back to the dark days of fighting for a playoff spot and failing. We brought in a goalie to replace Reimer. Someone who has less experience, and equal or worse stats on a better team. Unless Reimer is having some health issues, this move is ineffable.

There were some other things like letting a depth winger like Clarke MacArthur walk and re-signing third -line-center-in-stats-but-first-line-on-roster Tyler Bozak, but I want to talk about the big one: The Grabovski Buyout.

Grabovski was an important part of this team, but the coach's inexplicable hatred of the hard working two-way forward has driven him off the team. Randy Carlyle greatly reduced his playing minutes and demoted him to the fourth line. Instead of believing in one of the most consistent players on both ends of the ice, he chose to ignore him instead. Now he is separated from his "second wife" and linemate, Kulemin. We will miss you Grabbo.

For me, the Leafs were a lovable bunch. You have the young star with swagger in Nazem "The Dream" Kadri, the ever-grateful James "Optimus Reim" Reimer who brought us from the depths of goalie hell, and the hard working, lost-in-translation Mikhail "Grabbo" Grabovski, who constantly gets knocked down by bigger opponents and tenaciously gets back up again every single time. But with Grabbo gone and Reimer possibly being forced into a backup role, I just don't know what to think of this team anymore.

And to combine the two main topics of today, I've created this:

Is innovation a requirement?

It's all a matter of taste, but personally I feel that innovation is not required for a game to be good. Though very few games can pull off being a great game without some innovation, a lot of this depends on whether you're reviewing from an experience point of view (you're only concerned with the experience you have while playing the game) or a craft point of view (how well crafted is the game?).

Metacritic is a great site that collects various reviews from major publications. The game that inspired the deep and profound question that is the subject of today's post is
Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Most reviewers seem to think this game is fantastic despite its lack of innovation, while Gamespot thinks it is a mediocre game. Now, I realize that 75 isn't really that bad of a score from the stingy folks at Gamespot. But the average gamer (whatever that is), I suspect, will finish a maximum of about 24 titles a year, so just considering this year, if you only owned a PS3, you wouldn't even be giving this game a glance. Now, obviously not everyone plays every genre, etc., but you get my drift: If there were a top 25 PS3 games list this year, R&CF would not be one of them.

I haven't played the game, so I can't put my opinion in one way or the other about the game, and I must mention that I find GS's 75 way more palatable than the 100s from Gamepro and GameTap, but the general consensus seems to be that innovation isn't really that important. Or, coming back to my original analysis, that most publications review the experience, while Gamespot reviews the craft of gamemakery (I submit their complaints about the story in R&CF as Exhibit A. Will they also rip apart the story for Mario Galaxy?).

What do you think? How important is innovation when you think about playing a game? What are your favourite games that don't provide a single ounce of innovation?

Designing a game

It's a dream many of my generation live with: design a great game. I will start a series right here in an attempt to put together a great game design. This part will discuss the goals of the design.

The first question to ask is: What makes a game great?

This question is, of course, extremely tricky to answer. A single game will likely not be able to capture every aspect, but just taking things from popular games that already exist, we can start with a simple list:

• Accessibility - reach across genders, age categories, and pcs
• Atmosphere - especially in horror games
• Attachment - sense of responsibility for the character or its actions
• Cooperation - playing with others, offline or online. Forming clans or guilds
• Competition - competing against others directly (pvp) or indirectly (ladders)
• Customization - the look of the character, the space they own
• Distinction - someone playing the game can (and most of the time, will) have a different experience from someone else who has played it.
• Freedom - the ability to make choices and affect outcomes
• Graphics - technical (Half Life) or stylized (World of Warcraft)
• Rewards - some of the items listed above are their own rewards, but all great games have an excellent reward system. This item could be as simple as a sense of achievement, but it's something to keep in mind
• Social Interactions - chat, speech

And just to clarify, these are aspects a good design can control. The more technical aspects that can contribute to a gaming experience, such as gameplay, is a more technical issue. The goal of this game, then, is to specialize in as many of these areas as possible. And I say specialize in this case, even though it is contrary to maximum coverage, because I want to ensure that each aspect is a refined piece in the overall design, and not some mechanic that's just thrown in because we had to have it. For example, I wouldn't consider hotseat play to be satisfying for competition in Civilization 4. The game just takes too long for hotseat to be reasonable. However, in Jones and the Fast Lane, it works just fine.

The Summer Lull

One of the benefits of a MMO is that gamers don't have to suffer that lull that comes every summer - the two to three month vortex when few great games see release. If you think about it, almost everything is planned for Q3 or, every publisher's favourite, Q4, to try to cash in on the Christmas. Every system comes out in quarter three, Halo 3 is quarter four, Final Fantasy XII is quarter three, and the list goes on.

But in the bleak doldrums of quarter one and two, World of Warcraft will still be going strong with new content in every patch (I can only assume other MMOs do the same). It does make me wonder though: if the movie business releases their blockbusters in the summer months, when kids are all off from school, can't game publishers also capitalize on these, our most precious resources?

Ported games: Are they worth playing?

This has been an issue in the industry quite some time, but after trying Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone from Atari, this humble blogger has to step up and verbally bitch slap somebody. Now, I will say up front that I am a D&D whore. I will play almost anything that has slapped the Wizards of the Coast trademarked franchise on it. I've played, and still own the Gold box games. I was ecstatic and absolutely giddy when I first played Baldur's Gate. I think Neverwinter Nights is one of the best games I've ever played. And I am enjoying Demon Stone, but it is so painfully a port of a console game, it practically shoves a console down your pants and forces its joystick in your mouth.

Now, I'm not sure how it is for the rest of the game-playing universe, but I really enjoy tweaking graphics options. I enjoy finding which secret combination of resolutions, shaders, and detail quality will maximize my experience. But I do not enjoy having to quit to tweak them. Since consoles have none of these options, the graphics menu is a simple menu in the launcher. That's right. With none of the video options being available in-game, you have to restart the game to tweak every little detail. Also, what is the first key you hit when you try to skip the intro splash screens of various developers and publishers (it's the ESC key, right? If it's not, pretend it is)? That's right, the ESC key. However, because the enter button is the port of whatever joypad button skips these screens, that is the key you have to use. The controls are a bit clunky as well, but bearable so far. The graphics are really nice, but while they upped pretty much everything important, the little life bar section for your party looks like it just came out of a sewer. The contrast is so disgusting it's bothersome. They spent how long enhancing the 3D models and they couldn't improve this simple sprite map? I really can't imagine what gamers have done to deserve this half-assed effort.

There are a couple of other annoyances (such as not being able to quit right to the desktop from most parts of the game), but all in all it is pretty much a D&D version of the Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers game. Defeat monsters, buy new special moves and combos, buy new equipment, etc. The characters seem different enough to be interesting but I've only played two levels so far (a full review to come later).

Who do I blame for this? Atari. The whole job of a publisher is to ensure that the game is a polished product. They should make sure that gamers have what they need to fully enjoy the game. They are in charge of quality control and should not take their reputation lightly. Because Hasbro could really take their Neverwinter Nights franchise elsewhere, and Hasbro should threaten to do so if they keep seeing ports like this. I would like to say that we as gaming consumers should not buy the products, but that would probably just mean we'll get no ports at all. They'll never correlate the drop in sales to poor product quality.

Ra

Ra is a fun, fast, and accessible board game. It fits nicely in under an hour (perfect for some lunch-time gaming), and can accomodate three to five players. The rules are easy to learn, but the strategy is deceptively deep.

I have friends who know a whole lot about board games. They claim Reiner Knizia is a genius in game design. I don't know much about him, but just from playing Ra, I would have to agree. The game is simple to explain: You are trying to get the highest point total. You score at the end of each of the three rounds (called epochs). You get points during scoring by winning tiles through auctions. There are some tiles that go away at the end of the epoch, some tiles that only score at the end of the third epoch, and the mechanics of scoring are different for different types of tiles (for example, you only get points for pharoahs if you have the most of them). Not having some tiles by the end of an epoch can be detrimental. Depending on how many players are in the game, you get a certain number of auction tiles, each with a unique number on them, to bid with. When you win an auction, you get the last auction tile that someone else won an auction with for the next epoch, and you place your winning tile in the middle (so essentially, every auction also includes an auction tile). On your turn, you're down to three simple options: Add a tile to the auction track, call an auction, or use a special tile. An auction can also start if you try a "Ra" tile, and when the Ra track fills up or when everyone has used all their auction tiles, the epoch ends.

This will take you 15 minutes to learn. However, the evaluation of how much each tile is worth to you and your opponents takes in so many factors that the strategy is not immediately obvious. When should you call an auction? Since you have to take an auction if you called it, and no one else wants it, it becomes a risky proposition. How much should you bid on an auction? Are your opponents going to outbid you for the same auction? Does your opponent want the auction badly enough that you can force him to use a higher tile? You have to consider these things and more when you're playing this game that involves only fourteen tile types.

If you've never tried a board game outside of Sorry!, Monopoly, or Risk, you really need to try this game.

Powergame

The Powergame section is only recommended for readers who have tried the game, and are looking for some tips. Any comments on the strategy of this game are welcome.

I've played quite a few 3, 4, and 5 player games. The winning point total for 5 player games is usually around 40-45, for 4 player games it is around 45-50, and for 3 player games, you will likely need 50+. Three player games are generally more erratic as there tend to be rounds that are abhorrently short, but since you have four auction tiles, it's not terrible to be aggressive early in the epoch.

In general, if you and your opponent are the only ones left in an epoch, it is not a good idea to let them run it by exiting the round too early. It is generally safe to do so if there are only two empty Ra spaces left on the track. In fact, you should try to get your opponent out of the way so that you can run it as early as possible. It's a tricky balancing act like everything else in the game.

Controlling pharaohs is key in a 3 or 4 player game. You need to develop either pharoahs or go heavy in monuments if you want to win. I find the key in most games, no matter how many players, is to have a huge last epoch. Many game that I've won included 30 points in the last epoch, and monuments are excellent for this. If you are going for the monument strategy, then you will likely want high auction tiles going into the last epoch.

I generally dislike rivers because floods can get sniped or stolen very easily. However, if you can build them up in the first or second epoch, you can score big. If you are banking on a flood then you need to acquire yourself a God tile and then try to get in a 1 on 1 situation.

Don't bet on civilizations too early, unless the price is right. Since the second civilization isn't worth any immediate points, you can probably steal one cheaply later in the round.

Nintendo DS Lite: Not Just the IPod of Gaming

So once again Nintendo has maimed Sony in the arena of innovation. While the PSP is on life support, the Dual Screen is about to reach the height of its popularity with the combo-release of the sleek DS Lite and New Super Mario Bros. Forget that the polar-whiteness of the machine makes it look like a marketing idea stolen from Apple. Whereas the IPod didn't really have that much to offer in terms of innovation for MP3 players, the DS Lite is different from any handheld before it.

I borrowed a PSP for the week and was not convinced I needed one; I played the DS Lite for 5 minutes and I was convinced it was the best handheld ever. The drastic difference in attitude was precipitated by the overwhelming sense of innovation that the DS Lite had to offer. The touch screen simply changed the way you played a game. While Sony was busy sticking with its Playstation paradigm of copying Nintendo's innovations and making it better, Nintendo was busy with its own agenda to evolve the gaming world.

I can just imagine it now: Two perfectly lit board rooms, each with a large oaken table in the middle. One room contains the Sony executives and engineers, and the other houses Nintendo's masterminds. They are both staring the GameBoy Advance SP, wondering how they can improve on it. In both rooms, executives identify that the screen is too small and therefore, too limiting to the experience. A Sony engineer pipes up with a simple idea: "let's make it bigger". Simultaneously, in the other room, the Nintendo engineers respond with: "let's make two of them."

I encourage you to just try a game that uses the touch screen. Something like the mini-games in the New Super Mario Bros., or Meteos (a brilliant puzzle game). Try the wi-fi connectivity with a single cartridge. It will recall the wonder you felt the first time you played a video game.

Guild Wars

I played this game for about a week before I gave it up. Let me clarify: I really liked this game, then one monumental experience completely wrecked it for me. I was being my usual Mesmer/Necromantic self, having fun in the arenas at around level 9 or so. At the time I really had no idea why some of my teams had a long streak and some didn't, besides sticking together and reviving and all that, until someone mentioned something about droks armor.

Now, this was about a month or two ago, just after Factions (although I didn't have that installed), so they might have balanced this already, but I cannot go back. Anyway, I'm in a group with a W/Mo 6, and she is breezing through opponents all by herself. We won almost every match flawlessly, until we faced this other group, who had a W/Mo 9 with droks.

The fight went something like:
We killed 3 of their party once while they killed 3 of us twice. Game over, right? Nope. My W/Mo goes and re-kills the 3 of their party members (no joke, they couldn't kill her 4 on 1) after some chain-ressurection, and thus armies of good and evil began their eternal battle. Fifteen minutes of sword swinging and healing later, the W/Mo 9 finally wins. Why? Because our teammate had to go. They could've just sat there fighting forever.

Thus, my conclusion that this game is absolutely retarded (which sucks, cause I liked it a lot initially). I can't think of another PvP game where there is just no way to win unless your opponent leaves. And I've played some really long DoTa games.

Free Downloadable Games: The Last Frontier

Let me paint this gloomy scene:

I am in Brampton (possibly the dullest suburb in Canada) at my in-laws, sitting in a small room, bored from hours of reading. There is something that passes as a computer in front of me (a 700Mhz Celeron) with a DSL Lite connection. Even the Yahoo! Chess interface (the old one) runs slowly on the "computer", so what is a gamer to do?

After some time researching many (slow-loading) pages, looking at unfinished products (about 99% of the free gaming remake projects out there are unfinished), here are some connections if you ever find yourself in such desperate times:

• RetroRemakes - This site has tons of free options. Their
  scope is basically limited to remakes of really old games, and their list isn't completely up to date in terms of projects that have been abandoned, but I found myself playing The Legend of Shadow (Legend of Kage remake) for quite some time. I did run into a play-stopping bug as it slowed down to about 8-frames a second for no apparent reason halfway into the second area though. And of course, there is no save feature, so I resorted to...
• Space Quest 0 - Yes, Roger Wilco's lost adventure! This is such a throwback; you have to type. That evoked both a sense of horror and joy. Yes, you will actually have to type "search body" into the console if you want to make your way around this game. I didn't play this game too long, but the humour was spot-on and it didn't have any technical problems.

I downloaded, but did not get a chance to try the LodeRunner remake I found on SourceForge, but generally SourceForge is a bust for these kinds of things. Although I hear the Star Control 2 remake is solid.

Do you have an inside scoop on any free offline gaming that doesn't require much processing power or a real video card?

Industry goes boom?

I found this news article on Gamespot rather humourous. Especially the part where they refer to this analyst, Michael Pachter, who is predicting doom for the industry. Gee, if he didn't just prove that he knew nothing by predicting that the sales for this month would be way higher than they were. I love that logic. "This guy was totally wrong about this topic. But here is what he says about this topic in the future". I predict oil prices will go down over the next year. Way down.

This article led this Slashdot poster to believe that MMORPGs might be the cause. Of course, this inference is meaningless. What is interesting though is that if this is true, consoles will have to have a fast response on this front. They need to make MMORPGs work on consoles (except for Nintendo, whose consoles are niche and are clearly for people who enjoy having friends over to play). Good luck guys.

I think what is more likely is that consumers are just holding out on the current generation consoles until all the players are on the field. People are saving up months ahead so that they can get a PS3, or they are waiting for the 360 price drop that is imminent. I have often talked about starting some kind of PS3 fund this year, and I was only half-joking. I'm sure many people are doing the same. What are your plans for the next generation consoles?