Thursday Session: Riichi Again

  After a quick round of Da Vinci Code, it wasn't hard to get a Mahjong table going. There were more than four interested players.
We used the new set I had bought. It's a cheap set, made in China but Japanese in style. That means it's small (the tiles seemed very small the first time I saw them, but after playing with them a little, I think they're actually all right and not that small), there are no western indices, the white dragons are blank and there is one red five in each suit.
The lack of indices was a bit of a problem. I think it's one of those things you learn with practise (and it's a lot easier task than learning the Shogi pieces, for example, since you only need to learn the characters and winds, and few of the characters are really easy, too) and I also think it's something mahjong players should learn at some point. We had cheat sheets, of course. I think it slowed our game a bit, but not much. Don't let the lack of indices stop you from getting an otherwise cool set.
Anyway, since we had a Japanese set, we played riichi. We played for almost three hours and almost finished the game. A full game of riichi is two rounds or eight hands, but there can be more if there are draws or dealers win hands. We played 11 hands in total, I think, and were two hands (+ extra hands) away from finishing the game.
It was swingy, like riichi is. I think I scored the biggest hand in the game, for 11 600 points, but in the next hand I made a mistake that cost me 12 000 points, since I had to pay 4 000 points to other players for an incorrect winning hand. So, after few more failures I ended up dead last.
Few more words about the set. I bought it from MahjongMart (it's the white/yellow Dragon set), because it was dirt cheap. Of course, as usual, cheap means "low quality". The material is nice, but you can smell - from quite a distance - that it's made cheaply in China. The tiles are fine, but the case reeks. Hopefully it'll get better.
The carvings are decent, but the paint job isn't very good. The colours have been applied with a wide brush, it's not very exact work. Again, that's what to expect from a cheap set, really. The biggest problem colour-wise is the bamboo tiles. They are not green, but more like really dark brown.
So, if you want a cheap Japanese-style set, it's a valid option, but I'd probably suggest investing a bit more to get a nicer set. After all, it's going to be something you'll use for years. I actually sold the Dragon set already and have ordered this riichi set from Yellow Mountain Imports. Based on the pictures, it looks nicer: the colours are bright, clear and exactly applied. It's not very expensive, either, just $47, but the shipping costs were a lot more expensive. Apparently shipping stuff from Japan is fairly cheap. Of course, US folks will be fine since Yellow Mountain Imports is in USA and the shipping starts from $11.
Oh, by the way - remember my Board Game Auctions site? It's been doing great. People are really shopping for games in eBay. Old mahjong sets have been the biggest bestsellers there (and since they're often quite expensive, the commissions are good), but I've also made some money from old war games.
Since that site is doing so well, I thought I'll expand to other niches and now I'm seeing how Kids' Stuff Auctions will do. For that site I'm still waiting for Google to get to it and start bringing people in (which is, of course, part of the reason I'm mentioning it here, because Gameblog's front page is well-loved by Google - and why not ).

Back To New England

  I visited board game club today for a while. I had to leave early, but I did have time for a round of New England Railways. We got five players and this time, since I was carrying Age of Steam as well, we replaced the cardboard chits with actual wooden cubes. It was much better.
This time the results were slightly different than in our last session. Tero won with $65, Olli had $19, I had $9, Outi had $4 in the red and Robert was $14 in the negative. So, no debt death spirals, but no really good results either. Even Tero had some debt left and he was the only one to pay any debt at all.
The shortness of the game - just half of the three-player game - is obviously one reason. We also had a nasty case of plenty of blue cubes in the main network and no access to blue cities. An earlier link to the blue cities on the edge of the board would've increased the incomes, I believe.
My own game was bad... I got a bad start and took many, many turns to get any income (I didn't buy a link on the first turn, then bought two useless unconnected links, way to go!). I was tight on the loans, so in the end that didn't hurt too much, but it was somewhat boring.
It was fun, or at least fun enough, but I don't think I'm playing the game again with five players any time soon. Someone might enjoy this - or even play with six players, but I prefer the three-player game with more turns and more time to enjoy your network. Four-player game might be the best, I'll have to try and see. But five's too much for me, that I know.

Thursday Session: New England Railways

  My Thursday games started with a quick 2-0 loss in Truc and a four-player game of Race for the Galaxy. It's been a while since I played Race, but I was in good form and able to win (ok, so we had two newbies in the game).
The main course for me was, however, Winsome's New England Railways. I was able to score a copy from Northumbria Games earlier this year and now the game got on the table. I'm glad to say it's a really good game and clearly the best of the bunch I got (West Riding and Dutch Intercity were the other two).
This Early Railways game is an ancestor Age of Steam and shares some ideas: players build railroads on loaned money and move goods to get income. However, there are some big differences as well. The track-building isn't freeform: there are set connections between cities auctioned each turn. The loans are more expensive, but they can be paid off.
The loans cost 20% each round, like in Age of Steam, but they feel more expensive. In Age of Steams, shares pay 5 and cost 1 per round, while in New England Railways loans start from 10 and cost 2, and it's not rare to have, say, $100 in loans that costs you $20 per round in debt service. Income, however, is usually less than in Age of Steam. I found that going over 40 income was possible, but staying there for more than one round was hard.
So, ending up in a deadly debt spiral is fairly easy. In our game, it was common to take new loans to pay the debt service on old loans. In that sense our game was a fairly accurate simulation of typical debt-based economy.
Me and new guy Tuukka were more heavy-handed with our debt, while Tuomas was more careful. The difference between me and Tuukka was the health of our railroad networks. I got the best network and after Tuomas' strong few rounds I was in the lead. Tuukka, on the other hand, took a while to get any income. The result? I was deep in debt but in the end of the game I had paid all my debts and I got $110 in cash. Tuukka was deep in debt and in the end was even more in debt, finishing the game with $294 in the red. Tuomas paid off almost all his debts, ending up with $34.
Add to that the value of the network, and the final scores were 180 for me, 114 for Tuomas and -240 for Tuukka. In this light the mercy of going honestly bankrupt seems welcome... My victory was a result of a good network. I had a strong network : Boston, Providence, Worcester, Plainfield, Hartford, New Haven... I also got plenty of income from Tuukka, as my network connected well with his network. Tuomas had a nice network, but had a bit of a lack of good cubes to ship and support from Tuukka. Lesson learnt: a good, central network is a key to victory, and getting help from friends is nice.
New England Railways has a nice income reduction mechanism, by the way. Each round two dice are rolled. Each player loses 1/(2d6 +1) of his or her income, rounded down. It's a nice mechanism, less gamey than the income reduction tiers in Age of Steam. There's some randomness involved, but it hits everybody equally (relative to their income levels). We had few depression rounds when I rolled 3 or so - I lost 11 income twice. That hurt, since getting income was a lot harder than in Age of Steam - I made few 5-link shipments, but mostly shipped three links or so.
So, New England Railways is a really good game. It's similar to Age of Steam, but different enough. I definitely want to explore this game a tad more. Our session took a nice 1 hour 45 minutes. Of course the production quality is typical Winsome level, but using poker chips and wet-erase pens helped and replacing the low-quality goods chips with wooden cubes would help even more.

Thursday Session: Mahjong, Bausack

  Our Thursday sessions have returned to Thursdays. We got our old location back now the university is again open in evenings. Actually, that happened last week, I just missed the first meeting. This time we had a nice turnout, I think we had four tables going on at the same time.
My table was playing Mahjong, again. This time we tried playing Riichi, the modern Japanese game. It's a gambler's game, where concealed hands and major point swings play the leading role. It's fun, fairly simple and moderately short.
We played one three-player practise round, then the East round. One of the players had to leave early, but she was replaced with another, so we could finish the round. Everybody was more or less a newbie, particularly with the Riichi rules. Riichi has a minimum score, too, the hand needs to be worth one yaku (a double) - that's not as hard as the 8-point minimum of the Chinese official rules, but still, with newbies we probably should've played without it.
Anyway, it was fun, and I'm definitely playing Riichi again. I've played about ten games with Four Winds and I do like the ruleset. The biggest flaw of Riichi is the tendency for draws, but fortunately there's the tenpai-noten rule: after a draw, players who are tenpai (waiting) get points from those who are not (noten).
So, more Riichi!
Next up was Bausack, the old favourite from 1987 recently released in Finnish as Bandu (I did the rules). This is the dexterity game that looks like the odds and ends collection from a carpenter's workshop. We played the Knockout game, where the last tower standing is the winner. To spice up the game, the blocks are auctioned, either "pay to take it" or "pay to not to take it".
It was great fun, particularly our second game. The towers got outrageous. Petri, who has a history of doing miniature paintings, demonstrated his capabilities to put down difficult blocks between heartbeats while Make had definitely the worst case of shaky fingers, that was just nasty to even look at. Petri won the game, even though Harri had one more token - Petri had to add two tough blocks to his tower but he did it and won the game when Harri was simply unable to add anything to his tower.
There's a bit of a luck element in the end game, I think, as the order of players can play a bit of a role in the end, but I suppose it's not a huge problem, because in the end Bausack is such a fun game and watching the grand finale of the second game was just about as much fun as playing the game.
In the end I had the time to play a single round of Le Truc with Olli - another convert!

Last Train to Wensleydale first impression

I was fortunate enough to make it to the game night this week. Last Train to Wensleydale was most wanted of the new games, so we got full four players. Short version: it's good and worth buying.
Description of the game
Players build small railroads in the Yorkshire Dales, moving cheese, stone and passengers. Passengers are tricky, because they have specific needs, they need to reach the NER or MR network. Stone and cheese are easier to move.
Everything hinges on influence. There are four sorts: government, train, NER and MR influence. Players get influence from a Amun-Re style auction. Government influence determines track building order and is necessary to get rid of complaining farmers who want to block progress. Train influence is super important, as it's needed to rent trains and it also determines the order of goods movement. NER and MR influence are needed a bit in the track building and a lot in the end of the turn (I'll explain later).
Track-building is easy. You can only build one continuous stretch each turn, no forking! Track has a cost, which you can pay in investment cubes (= money that's replenished each turn) or influence. Building must start from a MR and NER town or from own track.
In the movement phase players rent trains of varying capacity and move stuff. Cheese can be moved if your track reaches the area where the cheese is, stone moves if your track is next to the hill with the stone. This is pleasantly simple. Red passengers want to reach a MR town, green passengers want to reach a NER town.
Players get profit from goods moved and collect those for end game scoring, loss is accrued from track on board. Placement on profit/loss track determines general turn order.
In the end of the turn, players can make one of the big companies to acquire their track. It takes a connection to a company town and some matching influence. No more losses from useless track! This is very important phase for the general well-being of your company.
This goes on for four or five rounds. After that you score your profit or loss, 1 point for each good moved during the game and 2 points for each set of four different goods.
Our session and my impression
I like the game. It's fairly hard to grok, I think we got it pretty much on the second or third round. Next time it'll go better. The rules aren't super clean, but we got only one thing wrong (the cost of takeovers). Still, takes a while to explain them.
The setup is notoriously tedious (two cubes are placed on each area, then wrong-coloured cubes - white on lowland, orange on hills - are removed, then passengers are placed in towns) and indeed a bit annoying. There's some fiddly tracking of influence, too.
The game took about 110 minutes. A bit long, but full of action and I can see fast experienced players playing this in 90 minutes. Still, two hours is fairly well justified, there's meat in the game (and I'm not talking about the board, which looks like a bacon omelette).
There's lots of clever stuff going on. I like the auctioning for company influence, the track-building, collecting goods and the takeovers - most of it, that is. Last Train is pleasantly different from the collect-the-shares train games and pick-up-and-deliver lot.
I started by building a track to Hawes in the middle of the hills. I kept the track the whole game, shipping plenty of stone to keep myself making profit. I also got some cheese and green passengers. The route had plenty of red passengers, but it took some effort and two turns of track-building to reach a red town. On the last turn, I did a separate track to gather up some more cheese and green passengers. I wasn't very efficient with the takeovers, so on the last turn I ended up on -3 in the profit/loss track.
However, I was the best with goods, gathering 34 points from four sets and ten more goods cubes. Petri got 23 (least cubes, +5 profit), Hannu 20 (29 points in cubes, -9 mostly from unnecessary track) and Tuomas 11 (21 points, -10 on p/l track).
I'm very glad to own the game and definitely want to explore it more. The different setups will lead to different games, so I suppose there's quite a bit of replay value there.

The Sims Tv

pubblicato: lunedì 17 gennaio 2005 da darkripper in: Varie Segnalazioni Pc Gestionale Sembra che Ea stia lavorando all’idea di uno show televisivo basato su The Sims e “interpretato” dai suoi personaggi. Per ora non si sa molto, ma il progetto credo che sia quello di far interagire i giocatori/spettatori con lo show, il tutto da casa. La cosa ovviamente avrà un successo spaventoso, visto che ormai i signori di EA hanno capito che basta scrivere “Sims” su qualcosa per stravenderla. Ok, su QUASI tutto. The Sims Online non é stato una gran vittoria.
Nel frattempo, si avvicina la data d’uscita di The Sims: University, primo add-on per The Sims 2 rilasciato da Maxis.
Non attendiamo altro.

PSP in vendita negli US a 200$

pubblicato: lunedì 10 gennaio 2005 da admin in: Varie Un esponente di Sony ha dichiarato al CES che la PSP sarà in vendita a marzo con un prezzo al pubblico inferiore a 200 dollari; sicuramente una mossa inaspettata che creerà qualche preoccupazione a Nintendo con il suo DS che, sul mercato a 150 $, sembra sia già stato venduto a quasi 3 milioni di persone.
Interessante leggere un articolo su Forbes che chiarisce la posizione di Sony nei confronti di iPod e del mercato della vendita di contenuti audio-video digitali.

Le speranze di Gamesblog per il 2005

pubblicato: venerdì 31 dicembre 2004 da darkripper in: Varie Pc PSP Nintendo DS RPG First Person Shooter MMORPG [Letto su Mobileblog di alcune previsioni per il 2005. Io sono scarsissimo con le previsioni, e inoltre l’Industria é già incasinata di suo, così spesso le previsioni si rivelano molto-troppo sbagliate. Ad esempio: non avrei puntato due lire sul GameCube, mentre molto puntai sul Dreamcast. Eccovi così i miei desideri per il 2005, anno che vedrà l’arrivo in Italia di due nuove console e di ben due giochi di ruolo online del calibro di Everquest 2 e World of Warcraft]

I controller per Ps2 di Street Fighter

pubblicato: venerdì 31 dicembre 2004 da darkripper in: Otaku Lifestyle Ps2 Abbastanza inutile, quindi assolutamente cool.
Pensateci, un controller senza stick analogici, quindi utilizzabile ormai esclusivamente con i picchiaduro 2d. Il tutto per commemorare l’anniversario di Street Fighter, che non credo abbia bisogno di presentazioni.
Un auto-mutilazione ludica in piena regola, disponibile in quattro versioni (Ken, Ryu, Akuma e Chun-li). Il mio preferito é quello di Ken, ma anche quello di Ryu non é male.
Come al solito disponibile da Lik-Sang e dai principali importatori. E se poi siete dei folli totali ecco la versione arcade, decisamente consigliata se cominciate a massacrarvi i pollici a furia di mezzelune.

Unity Cancellato

pubblicato: venerdì 10 dicembre 2004 da darkripper in: Varie Gamecube
Unity, strano esperimento che il vecchio guru Jeff Minter stava sviluppando con il supporto di Lionhead, é stato cancellato.
Il gioco proponeva un gameplay simile a quello di Rez, solo che lo sviluppo avrebbe impiegato ulteriore tempo, troppo per riuscire a trovare una sua collocazione.
Minter ha postato una lettera ai fan nel suo forum, spiegando che portare avanti il progetto avrebbe significato ottenere qualcosa di molto differente dall’idea originale.

Rilasciato il trailer di Band of Brothers

pubblicato: venerdì 10 dicembre 2004 da darkripper in: Pc Xbox First Person Shooter Downloads
Inutile mentire cambiando titolo: Brothers in Arms é chiaramente un’imitazione ludica del bellissimo serial tv Band of Brothers.
Come spesso accade con i First Person Shooter storici, nonostante l’assenza di licenza ufficiale, non é difficile scovare gli elementi (e spesso le inquadrature) del cinema di riferimento.
Nel trailer di Brothers in Arms, da poco disponibile online su Fileplanet, c’é più o meno un concentrato della serie prodotta da Steven Spielberg e Tom Hanks.
Brothers in Arms offre la gestione di una intera compagnia di paracadutisti, con un approccio strategico che a me ricorda vagamente Full Spectrum Warrior.
Il gioco sembra interessante, ma bisognerà vedere come al solito come si comporterà l’intelligenza artificiale dei propri compagni. L’uscita in ogni caso é prevista per febbraio.

Left 4 Dead 2: disponibile la demo per gli abbonati Gold di Xbox Live

pubblicato: mercoledì 04 novembre 2009 da Matteo F. in: Pc First Person Shooter Demo Downloads Xbox 360
Dopo aver reso disponibile la demo di Left 4 Dead 2 per chi ha preordinato il gioco attraverso Gamestop e Steam, Valve ha rilasciato in giornata anche la versione per gli utenti Gold di Xbox 360.
Del peso di circa 2 gb, la demo offre la possibilità di giocare una parte della campagna The Parish ambientata a New Orleans sia in singolo che in cooperativa (via spit-screen o insieme ad altri 3 utenti via Xbox Live).
I possessori di abbonamento Silver dovranno invece attendere il 10 novembre, data in cui verrà rilasciata la demo pubblica.
Ricordiamo che Left 4 Dead 2 è atteso per PC e Xbox 360 il 17 novembre.