Puzzles and Alexander Shen

When looking for a demo of Alexander Shen’s Crumbling Dungeon, I found out that there was a Memorial Day sale on their games and puzzles. Which was a way of getting Crumbling Dungeon and a bunch of other stuff for a darn fine price. I had a couple items already but it was still a real bargain.

While I initially tried out Crumbling Dungeon, I decided that I wanted to next try out three different puzzle collections: Circuit Board Square, Galactic Diplomacy Corps, and  ‘I Have to Retrieve 5 Gems from a Dungeon That is Falling Apart and I Have Leas Than 30 Seconds to Do It’ The last makes me want to reread Chip Delany’s science fiction (We In Some Strange Power’s Enploy Move On a Rigorous Line and Time Considered As A Helix of Seni-Precious Stones arw great works as well as insane tities) and I will call it 5Gems from here on out.

Circuit Board Square is a flat-out puzzle with no random elements or theme. You have to fill out a three by three grid with the numbers one to nine. The edges and the corners have sums and you have to fill out the grid to make all the sums work. (And, yea, that means the center square isn’t part of any of the sums)

I described it as Sudoko for people with very short attention spans to my wife. She said ‘So, children?’ I said ‘No, me’ There are some simple strategies to filling out a grid and I find, once I do one, I end up doing a couple. And, if I end up in a classroom again, I’d think of using Circuit Board Square.

Galactic Diplomacy Corps is a grid where each square has a number and symbol. You draw a line that connects like number or symbol to like symbol or number. The twists are you can’t land on a square that the line has passed through or stopped at and you start to lose points if you get too many of the same symbol.

Honestly, GDC is the least engaging Shen puzzle/game I’ve tried. It doesn’t have the quirky charm that permeates a lot of their games. Nor does it razor-sharp simplicity of Circuit Board Square. Honestly, if it was broken or bad, I’d honestly find it more memorable.

Speaking of quirky charm, 5Gems has got it. You navigate a maze to collect five gems in a limited number of turns. Traps randomly block spaces, switches let you knock down walls and you have three one-time special powers.

Honestly, it makes me think of a game you’d have programmed in basic on an Apple ][e in the early 80s. And I mean that in a compliment. I can’t say 5Gems is a good puzzle but it’s got character. I have had fun with it.

Since I started exploring PnP and indie games, I’ve found a world that’s both unpolished and flavorful. You aren’t going to find designers who are undiscovered Reiner Knizias or Richard Garfields. But you will find neat little things you’d never find anywhere else.

And while a lot of Shen’s work feels like it could use some more workshopping (I’ll cover Quests Over Coffee at some point and it’s an exceptions. It rocks) but they definitely show persistence. And, when I think about other indie designers I’ve looked through, their charming and solid body of work stands out. It’s not perfect but it’s good stuff.

Look, Light Speed is fun. Period.

I hadn’t planned on writing about Light Speed but it came up when I was talking about Cheapass Games. And I realized that I’ve been occasionally playing that game for almost twenty years. There’s not a lot of games that I can say that.

Light Speed, originally part of Cheapass Games Hip Pocket line, is one of the only Cheapass games not designed by James Ernest.  (It’s by Tom Jolly) It is said that James Ernest will be sad if you tell him it’s your favorite Cheapass game. It’s pretty damn good, though. (I do like Button Men more, James)

Light Speed is a real time game where everyone gets their own  deck of ten spaceship cards in their own color. Each one has one to four hit points and one to four lasers shooting out and some shields to block lasers.

Gameplay is dead simple. It’s a real time so no turns. You are slapping cards down and that part of the game is over when someone runs out of cards. Then you need to see what the lasers hit. Get out a piece of floss or a retractable ID holders and follow each laser’s path to see if it hits anything.

The cards are numbered and they go in order. The Moth is fragile with one of the weakest lasers but it also shoots first. The Destroyer has lots of hit points and a whopping four lasers but it goes last.

You score points by destroying other folks’ space ships. You can also mine an asteroid for minerals but, I’ll be honest, half the time we don’t play with the asteroid and just focus of blasting away at each other.

When I first played Light Speed, all those many years ago, it confused me. Was a game allowed to be this simple? Did it count? When I first tried it, I was primarily a RPG player and I was used to needing several books to play a game.

Since then, I’ve played hundreds of games, including very simple RPGs. The whole complexity equals value is a false paradigm as far as I’m concerned. I mean, since then, I’ve learned how to play Go and that can be broken down to less than ten rules. And one of those rules is you use a board to play! 

(Then, we start arguing about depth versus complexity. Go is not complex, folks. It _is_ deeper than the Mariana Trench.)

Yes, Light Speed is very, very simple. Yes. Scoring with a retractable ID badge you stole out of your WH40K box takes longer than actual game play. But it is also very clever and unbelievably intuitive and a lot of fun. You can explain it to anyone with half the explanation just showing them the cards. And they will love it.

Light Speed gives you a chance to set aside being a game snob and just have a good time. And I spend plenty of time being a game snob.  

A non-wargamer reads Battletech Quick Start

As promised, I downloaded and read the quick start rules for Battletech.

I’ve read a lot of quick start rules over the years, admittedly for RPGs, not for war games. I feel like a quick start should try and do three things: give you the flavor of the system, give you enough to be able to play the basics of the system and make you want to play the system more.

And, I think the Battletech quick start rules gets 1.5 of those goals right.

Its biggest failure is not goving you a sense of the flavor of the game or its setting. It’s the future and people fight in giant robots. End of story.  Since I started looking into Battletech, I’ve found a surprisingly rich setting and timeline. I don’t expect to get all that from what is effectively a brochure. However, at least identifying the sides and emphasizing the ‘real robot’ aspect of the system would have been good.

The actual rules were pretty good. I particularly appreciated that it includes a small map, two standers and the stats for two standees. More importantly, the rules do their fundamental job very well. They lay out how the game works step by step. If I had seen these quick start rules back in the 80s, I’d have eaten them up.

The actual rules themselves didn’t excite me that much but I am pretty sure that’s ‘Seinfeld isn’t Funny’ trope at work. Battletech helped define giant robot gaming and science fiction war gaming. Of course it’s going to have an old hat feel. I’m sure the rules have been refined a lot over the decades but I’m also sure they didn’t fix what wasn’t broken.

So, really, what I want, what I think is painfully missing, is two paragraphs of fluff to make me care about Battletech’s world.

There are Battletech novels? Tons of them?

Ah, Battletech.

While I have been aware of Battletech since the 80s because I saw ads for it in Dragon Magazine, I have never been interested in it.

I’ve been aware of the giant robot genre since I was knee high to a grasshopper but I’ve never been really grabbed by it. Maybe it’s due to being exposed to Tranzor Z, a really bad dub of Mazinger Z, at too young an age. Put me off of Voltron without even trying to giving it a chance. The only cartoon with giant robots I really got into was Robotech and that was more because it was a soap opera like the X-Men.

(Incidentally, I know that many anime fans hate Robotech because of the massive editing that had to happen to scrunch Macross-Southern Cross-MOSPEADA into enough episodes that it could be syndicated on American television. I am not one of them because, dude, I was there. 

It’s hard to believe now, when manga and anime has become a mainstream mainstay, but when Robotech came out, there was no market for it. It was unlike anything we had ever seen before. As a cynical grownup, looking back, I’m amazed it worked. And it helped create an environment where authentic anime could flourish in a western market.

On the other hand, I completely support hating Harmony Gold for being a bunch of litigious jerks who sued anything that remotely resembled Robotech and locked Macross out of the western market. Which brings me back to Battletech, which got sued multiple times by Harmony Gold)

When Humble Bundle released a bundle Battletech fiction, I was completely non-interested. Until I saw that Michael Stackpole had written a bunch of them. Then I became very interested.

And I’ve begun to actually look into Battletech.

I’ve learned that, along with WH40K, it’s one of the OG science fiction warfare franchises. Neither of them started the genre but they both helped boost it. 

I’ve already read Warrior: En Garde, Stackpole’s first book. I was confused about how the clans didn’t get a mention in the book. Then I learned the clans hasn’t been introduced when the book had been written lol

Entirely new, setting altering factions getting added in? Damn, that is like WH40K!

I doubt I’ll ever play the actual game (just like Death Angel or Space Hilk are the only WH40K games I’m in any danger of trying) but I’ve downloaded the quick start rules to learn more about Battletech. 

However, like WH40K, I sure will read the fiction.

Cheapass Games as games, not artifacts

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been purging my game as part of a big move. This is far from the first time I’ve had big purges but this will end up being a big one. 

And, originally unrelated to game purging, I was cleaning out a closet and I found a box of Cheapass games. A big chunk of their catalog from the days when the games were in envelopes.

And I had to ask myself: do I need these? Not only had I clearly not played them in over a decade, virtually all of them are available as PDFs. Seriously, not only can I make my own copies, thanks to the laminator, I can copies with better component quality. 

They don’t exist for me as games. They exist as artifacts. And I don’t need to keep them since I have almost all of them as PnP projects if I want them as games.

I did keep the absolute worst of them, Las Vegas, since Cheapass never posted that one (and I think the master copies have been lost. Probably intentionally and with a match and lighter fluid) If I ever want to play it again, I actually need to keep it.

Incidentally, none of the Hip Pocket line were in that box. Because those were the Cheapass games I played the most lol. And if I am purging with an eye for storage space, they get more forgiveness.

My May Gaming

As actual life stuff gets more busy, learning new games is going to be a lower and lower priority. In May I learned four games that were new to me and half of them were pretty much fluff.

I learned:

Battle Card: Market Garden

The Grand Opening

River Wild

Crumbling Dungeon

Battle Card: Market Garden feels less like a game and more like a lesson of how hard it would have been to actually pull Operation Market Garden off. (Which is actually kind of cool and I know some history teachers that might like to use it) Crumbling Dungeon is just a quirky maze puzzle that you could do over your cornflakes.

The Grand Opening fulfilled ny goal of learning at least one  Roll and Write a month. A two-page spread about seating and serving guests at a restaurant, I found it a pleasant, casual-weight game. Dark Imp Games continues to deliver a happy game experience.

River Wild is a 18-card solitaire game by Steve Aramini from ButtonShy. I’d say it resembles Scott Almes Sinply Solo series from BurtonShy more than Aramini’s own Sprawlopolis seres. And, to be honest, River Wild falls short of either of those two series. Two series that I think are the cream of the crop as far as solitaire-optional micro games so it’s an unfair bar. River Wild is still good with very tight decisions.

One game I decided to revisit was Bank or Bust from Dark Imp Games. The elevator pitch is Can’t Stop with special powers. I felt like it was the weakest game I tried from the company and multiple plays just reinforced that. Having only one die and busting on sixes just took away too much control, even with speciall powers. I still like the concept.

I have a small stack of three or four games I’m hoping to learn in June. We will see if life has other plans.

My May PnP

 May.

This was the first of what promise to be very busy months. School has wrapped up and we are getting ready for our move across the country.

This is what I made:

Restaurantrepreneur

Castaway 

Beach Life

Qwinto

River Wild (demo)

30 Rails w/Yard Builder

Pointree w/Alpakaland 

Mixture w/Time Machine

Roll Pirates w/Jurassic Hunt

River Wild was my ‘big’ project for the month. It’s an eighteen card game by Steven Aramini that’s very much in spirit of Scott Almes Simply Solo series. I honestly don’t think it’s as good as most of Almes’ designs but that’s still room to be very good.

However, most of my crafting in May was laminating Roll and Writes to make a travel folder. There’s going to be a stretch (admittedly, probably a month tops) where almost all my games will be packed away so I want a library that takes up minimal space for that time. I’ve made laminated copies of many of the games but this time I double-sided a lot of them to cut back even further on space.

Probably won’t make a real difference but it did make a psychological difference lol. And while we are only starting to get packing into high gear, getting the folder done ‘early’ is also good for my head.

June and July are going all about the move and settling in. I actually have project laminated that just need to be trimmed so I can finish some projects when everything but a pair of scissors is packed away.