We’ve tried our hand at deck building in the past, and the results were never particularly gratifying; we’ve always had a lot more fun playing with pre-built theme decks. The nice thing about the Eldrazi decks is that they come with a 41-card, pre-built theme deck, as well as a booster pack. We bought all five theme decks, and spread the booster pack cards amongst them all, effectively getting five decks that are mostly pre-built and designed with a lot of synergy in mind, but with some level of customization.

At any rate, our most recent game lasted more than an hour. My deck was red/green, while hers was blue/white. We spent most of the game at a stalemate, having creatures in play that effectively countered each other and discouraged attacking from either side. Occasionally one of us would get the upper hand for a little bit and make a push for the win, but such an advantage only lasted for a round or two at most before the other player got the right cards to counter the push.

We also spent most of the game at the same life point totals: she had 7, and I had 30. I had drawn some nice healing cards that had topped me up beyond 20, and she had suffered from some early attacks on my part before her defenses had really been shored up. Despite this seeming advantage on my part, she wound up winning the game in brilliant style. My heaviest hitters had been affected by Narcolepsy, a blue card that causes them to remain tapped indefinitely. I had some good blockers, but nothing that could really deal significant damage. Add to that the fact that she had some serious blockers–including one creature that was, I think, 5/12 by the end of the game–and I just couldn’t get through to deal those last 7 points of damage.

Then, she lured me into a trap. She moved a Narcolepsy card from one of my powerful, durable fliers to a powerful but fragile creature that I was less likely to attack with. That creature had a card called Splinter Twin on it, though, meaning that I could create a short-lived duplicate of that card every round and attack with it, even if it was always tapped. Puzzled, I decided to capitalize on what I perceived as a tactical error on her part (or her simply wanting the game to be over), and I attacked with my 7/1 Fire Boar and my 5/5 Conquering Manticore. She had 6 hit points at this point. She blocked the Fire Boar by letting one of her 2/2 creatures die, but let the Manticore through, bringing her down to 1 life point. I thought I had the game well in hand at that point; after all, I still had 30 life points.

Then, she played her ace in the hole, a card she had been sand-bagging since the beginning of the game: Near-Death Experience. It’s a card that’s very situationally useful, and hard to use effectively. Quite simply, it’s a sorcery that dictates that, if you have exactly 1 life point, you win. Which she did.

All in all, it was probably the best game of Magic I’ve ever played. So often in Magic, the strategy of the game is hampered by one player having too much or too little mana, restricting their ability to play effectively. That wasn’t really the case in this game. There was a lot of push and pull, give and take, and even though our life point totals were pretty far apart, there was a clear sense that it was anyone’s game most of the time; we were just waiting for someone to get a trump card. I assumed that it would be me: my deck was heavy on Eldrazi–large, high-cost, extremely powerful creatures that force you to discard permanents willy-nilly when they attack you–and I figured I’d eventually draw one and that would be that. I was not counting on Near-Death Experience (a card that came from a booster pack, by the way), and my wife used that to her advantage brilliantly. If only all games of Magic could be this epic.

Dead Space: I’m possibly a bit late to the party on this one, but I picked up Dead Space for a really good price around Christmas and just now got around to playing it. I’m not finished with it yet, but I’m eight hours or so into it and I’m really enjoying it. The atmosphere is suitably creepy, and while it doesn’t really create fear (what video game does, really?), it does succeed in creating an awful lot of tension. The fact that the main character, Isaac Clarke, doesn’t speak is a little bit strange considering how much he gets spoken to, especially when you take into account that there’s a character in the game who is supposed to be personally important to Isaac. The game spins a good yarn, though, and the combat is pretty good.

The Humble Indie Bundle: This is a group of indie PC games, for which you can name any price you want, pay it, and get them all. You can choose how much of your money goes toward the developers, and how much goes toward Child’s Play. There are some worthwhile games in the bundle, and while I haven’t liked all of them, I like enough of them that I’m happy I paid for the bundle. Plus, it’s for charity. Go buy it.

Of the games in the bundle, I’ve played World of Goo, which is excellent (I own this on Wii, too). It’s got a great Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, and even has Danny Elfman-esque music, and the puzzling is very, very good. I’ve played about twenty minutes of Aquaria, and I really like what I’ve played. Simple controls but apparently deep gameplay, and the music and art style are fantastic. Gish is sort of a mixed bag; it’s got a really neat premise and some cool mechanics, but the controls are frequently fiddly and annoying, and I feel that the game gets in its own way a lot. Samorost 2 is a Flash-based adventure game that is visually very charming. The problem is that there are a lot of pixel hunts in the game, and some of the puzzles are a little obtuse. Worse, there are puzzles that you can bring almost to completion over the course of a few minutes, screw up one thing (without realizing that you’re doing anything wrong), and have to do the whole thing again, from the beginning. It is very short, though, so you should at least give it a try. The other two, Lugaru and Penumbra: Overture I have yet to spend any real time with.

D&D Encounters: I got to play in Encounters again, and had a blast. I’ve played two different characters so far, both from the Player’s Handbook 3. First I played a human monk, which was very satisfying. I like the monk class quite a lot; very mobile and capable of some pretty spectacular stuff on the battlefield. Flurry of blows is also one of my favorite striker damage-spikes because of its versatility. The second character I played was a longtooth shifter seeker, which was also a lot of fun. I didn’t do a whole lot of damage (I was using a javelin, meaning that all of my attacks dealt 1d6+4 damage, even encounters and dailies), but I really felt like I was effective at controlling the battlefield, and my daily power made a significant difference in how the encounter played out.

My Home Game: My friend Dean isn’t going to be able to DM his mini-campaign for a while, so the campaign I’m DMing is resuming. I’m very excited to get back into the DM’s seat, and I’ve got some stuff planned. I’ll be updating the wiki as we play, as usual, and I’ll probably post some of the more exciting encounters on this blog, for your own use. Game day is the 23rd, which is only a week away!

The potion mechanic is nice. For those who don’t know, most of the new cards in Alchemy have a money cost like any other action card, but also cost one potion; potions are a new kind of treasure card that you can buy for 4 coins. I like the fact that it makes these cards a little bit rarer unless you really build your deck to get them, because many of the Alchemy cards are fairly potent.

The core of the expansion is, of course, the new action cards. I got a chance to play with all but two of them (Vineyard and Herbalist) over the course of two games. I realized the potential of Alchemist a little too late, and my opponent really hammered me for it. Alchemist gives you bonus draws and actions, meaning that you can use it to chain long strings of actions and potentially go through your entire deck. What makes this card so potent is that, if you play at least one potion on the same turn that you play your Alchemists, all of those Alchemists go back on top of your deck. As you can imagine, this is an extremely effective strategy when your deck is built for it. I lost that game, largely because my opponent had more Alchemists than I had and was utilizing them more effectively.

The second game was a close one. I had an early lead because of all the Familiars I was snapping up. The Familiar is a +1 card, +1 action effect, but it’s also an attack that forces other players to take a curse. If you have a lot of Familiars, you can chain them together to force multiple curses, which is really nasty. At one point I played four of them in one turn, forcing my opponent to take four curses. The curse deck emptied pretty quickly, meaning that Familiar become somewhat less useful; the go-to replacement for it was Apothecary, a slightly cheaper card with the same card/action bonus, but that allows you to reveal the top four cards on your deck, take any potions or coppers, and put the rest back on top of your deck in any order. This was nice for getting more money and precious potions, and could have been extremely potent if it were in the same game as Alchemist.

Sadly, my early lead evaporated at the very end of the game because of one card combination that my opponent got a chance to use on me a few times. He played Throne Room (from Intrigue, which allows you to double the effect of the next card you play) on the new Possession card. Possession allows you to take your opponent’s turn for him, making his plays and gaining any cards he would have gained. You can’t cause any permanent harm to your opponent; trashed cards are simply set aside, then discarded at the end of your turn. Also, your opponent still gets a normal turn afterward. However, when combined with Throne Room, it means that my opponent was gaining more benefit from my cards than I was. This was particularly nasty because he kept on forcing me to draw and use my Philosopher’s Stones on his behalf. These are treasure cards that are worth 1 coin for every 5 cards in your deck and discard pile, and at that point I had close to thirty cards. He drew both of my Philosopher’s Stones in one turn, twice, meaning that two Provinces that I would have been able to buy, he bought instead. This, I think, is what clinched the game for him.

Overall, I really like Alchemy. My friend said, and I agree, that some of the cards (Possession, in particular) can really bog down games with more than two players, so it might be best used with only two. It does serve to make two-player games more interesting, though, and has cards that favor both thin, action-heavy decks and larger decks.

To sum it up, it’s a game about people who haven’t slept for a while. After a certain point, the theory goes, sleep becomes a choice, and when you choose not to sleep, you awaken to the Mad City around you. The Mad City is a city that exists alongside our own world, and it’s populated by “Hollow Men”, who are basically people who have become automatons, extras in the Mad City, and the Nightmares who rule it. As one of the Awakened, the Nightmares target you, but you have power–drawn from your exhaustion and madness–to fight back.

After reading it, I really wanted to play it, so when my friend Matt agreed to play with me, I jumped on the opportunity. Matt created a character who was already a paranoid schizophrenic–that was, in fact, why he wasn’t sleeping; he was afraid that “they” would come and get him. This become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as his Awakening made him a target for a very sinister Them, indeed. He journeyed into the Mad City and tried to figure out what was going on.

Eventually he learned that the one who was after him was a being known as the Tacks Man. He planned to lure the Tacks Man into a trap, using the villain’s well-known greed against him. One of my favorite scenes involved Matt running from Officer Tock and his clockwork cops, carrying a fake hand of King Midas inside a fake stasis machine. He escaped his pursuers, only to run into the Paper Boys. The Paper Boys write about things–murder and mayhem, mostly–and those things have a habit of coming true. They were interested in Matt, but Matt did some fast-talking and convinced them that the hand of Midas was a much bigger story. They took the bait and wrote about the discover of Midas’s hand, at which point the fake became the real thing.

It was a great session, and I’d like to run the game again. The nice thing about DRYH is that it’s really easy to make a game that is almost entirely player-driven. It’s good to go in with a few ideas as the GM, but mostly you’re going to want to look at your players’ characters–their motivations and goals–and use those to generate story hooks that your players will want to run with. The system is simple enough that it facilitates this style of play, making improvisation extremely easy.

I had a great time, and I’d recommend the game to anyone who’s a fan of works like Dark City and Neverwhere.

So that I might end on a high note, I’ll cover the bad stuff first. The single biggest gripe I have with the game is probably one you’ve heard before, if you’ve read anything resembling a review for this game before now: the controls. Everything except for the camera and the ability to rotate objects is controlled using the stylus, and while this works well enough for positioning and manipulating objects, Maxwell (your character) is just as dumb as dirt. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve tried to move a particularly fiddly object, only to see Maxwell jump merrily to his death in a pit of lava or shark-infested waters. Even when I’m trying to control Maxwell, he often fouls things up through no apparent doing of mine. Controlling Maxwell is a very approximate and imprecise, and often you’ll want him to, say, dig through ice with a pick-axe, and he’ll instead jump in place like a spastic mental patient. Which sort of brings me to the next flaw.

Everything is controlled by a physics system; the problem is, the system doesn’t model relative weight all that well, if at all. Why is it that I can set a car down next to a ledge, but as soon as I attach a rope to it, it gets pulled right off the cliff? Why can’t my helicopter lift a penguin? Similarly inscrutable, at least occasionally, is the game’s internal logic. Why, when I try to break a starite out of a block of ice with a sledge hammer, do I break the starite, too, but when I shoot the same block with a machine gun, the starite survives? Why will my vampire attack just about everyone except for a pesky pair of redcaps?

The camera, too, needs some work. Controlling the camera is mapped to the d-pad, and works just fine; the problem is that it snaps back to Maxwell after about a second and a half of inactivity, which is simply inconvenient in a game in which you’ll often want to be creating things and placing them in areas where Maxwell isn’t (presumably so he doesn’t accidentally jump off a cliff or something).

All that said, I find I simply can’t stop playing the game. I frequently curse it, and it frequently frustrates me, but I can’t stop playing it. It’s simply too original a concept, and the basic concept is simply too well-realized, for me to pass up. And for that reason, if you’ve been at least a little bit interested in this game, or if you like puzzle games, you should go out and buy it. And if my earlier negativity has dissuaded you, you should still buy it. Why? Because every copy that gets bought makes it more likely that a sequel will be released, a sequel with better controls, better physics, a better camera, and better internal logic. And because it’s crazy fun, when it works right.

The other game we played did not leave quite so good an impression on me. We played Catan: Cities and Knights; it’s probably the third time I’ve played a Catan game, and it really drove home for me some problems that I had with the game initially. I’m going to say something that might be a little controversial: I think that Catan is a poorly designed game. That might be a little strong; I think there are some poor design choices within the game that can cause the game to be completely un-fun for one or more players.

There are a couple of factors that contribute to this opinion. First is that the game is decidedly not beginner-friendly. As I’ve said, I’ve only played Catan games about three times now, and that’s over the course of two or three years, so I’d still consider myself a beginner. Every time I’ve played the game, I’ve felt like I didn’t know what I was doing initially, and that I was at an enormous disadvantage because of it. The strategies in Catan are not always immediately apparent to a beginner, and this can make for a bad first impression of the game. The first two times I played, I had enough fun that I was willing to play again.

Sadly, I don’t think it gets another chance from me, and this is largely due to the high degree of luck within the game. Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with luck-driven games. Fluxx is highly luck-driven, but it’s short and you always have decisions to make and things to do, regardless of the cards you get. Last Night on Earth is considerably longer and also has a high degree of luck. In this case, however, I think that the randomness supports the theme well, and bad luck still never robs you of your ability to make decisions. And that’s really the crux of the matter here. A game is only fun when you can affect the outcome of the game. As soon as you feel like nothing you do matters, it stops being fun. And that’s exactly what happened last night.

As I’ve said, I consider myself a beginner when it comes to Catan games, and this means I don’t always know the optimal strategies or the optimal places to put my starting settlements. I placed my settlements last night in spots that I thought were advantageous; I had access to a port that allowed me a 2:1 trade on wheat, and in theory I had access to a lot of wheat. In theory. The problem was, because of the luck of the dice, I almost never got resources. There were entire half-hour stretches of time where I was the only one not getting any resources at all. In Catan, resources are everything. Without resources, you can’t really take any actions, and you can’t really make any decisions. Because of this, I spend most of the game reading the Adventurer’s Vault. I felt completely impotent throughout the entire game, starting around turn 2, and there was really no mechanic to allow me to affect the outcome of the game without resources. Because your access to resources is based largely on your initial placement and (mostly) on the luck of the dice, I literally had absolutely no control over what happened in the game once the initial placement was over. This made for a two-hour game (we ended prematurely; the game could have gone on for another hour at least) that was not the least bit fun for me, and it strikes me as exceedingly poor game design.

I think that, if you’re going to design a game to rely a lot on luck, you need to put mechanics in the game that allow players to continue to make decisions regardless of how luck treats them. I’m not saying that someone who’s extremely unlucky in the game should have the same chance to win as someone who’s extremely lucky; I just think that they should be able to do something meaningful with their turns. On most of my turns, I rolled the dice, saw that I couldn’t do anything, and passed the dice to the next player. Fun, huh? I don’t think I’ll ever play a Catan game again.

Hitman: Blood Money: This is actually the first Hitman game that I’ve actually completed, and I liked it quite a lot. Some of the missions were very difficult for me to complete gracefully, but you can jump into any mission you want to at any time once you’ve beaten it, so I may go back and remedy that at some point. Like its predecessors, it’s less an action game and more a game of patience and problem-solving. You have a target (or, in many cases, multiple targets) that you have to eliminate. You’re rewarded for not killing other people, for not being seen killing people, for not blowing your cover, and for not leaving any trace that you were there (including bullets in your targets’ heads). The best kills look like accidents, and it’s entirely possible in most (if not all) missions to go in with no guns and complete the mission. Again, I liked it a lot.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: I may wind up giving this one back. I liked it at first; I’ve always been a fan of these action/puzzle-solving games, and I like spatial puzzles like those presented in the game, and in the most recent Tomb Raider games. I must say, though, that this game is frustrating despite its time-rewinding feature, largely because I feel like I’m fighting the controls and the camera every step of the way. The camera is obstinate and uncooperative, frequently becoming lodged in places that give me no useful vantage point. The controls are floaty and imprecise, making it difficult to accomplish the precision that the puzzles require of you. All of this may have been better on the Xbox, its original system; I’m playing it on PC, and I’m not having much fun.

Gun: Guess what? I’ve decided I like western games. At least, I like this one. I’m having a lot of fun shooting bandits, riding around on horseback, and layin’ down the law, Eastwood style. It’s great fun.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition: since you can swap between the original graphics and the new graphics on the fly, I can tell you that the new graphics are a huge improvement, though the animation looks strange at times. The voice work is good for the most part, though the game has its fair share of delays between lines. The hint system is great, and it saved me from frustration many times, particularly toward the end where there’s a lot of pointless and annoying backtracking over fast stretches of Monkey Island. Worth the $10; not sure I would have felt okay about it if I’d paid more.

Plants vs. Zombies: Yeah. The title says it all, really. This is a fantastically fun and addictive little game. It gets difficult (especially in the unlockable mini-games), but it ramps up pretty gradually, allowing you to get a handle on what all of your plants can do, and on what all of the zombies can do. Definitely worth the money.

The Sims 3: As many have said, it’s The Sims, with a “3″ after it. Is it more of the same? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. It is more of the same, but they’ve managed to update enough so that it remains fresh and fun. If you like Sims games, you’ll probably like this one; if you don’t, I doubt this one will change your mind. If you’ve been curious about this crazy Sims thing that everyone’s been talking about since you got out from under that rock, this one’s a good entry point into the series.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: I just got done playing the demo, twice. I like the game. The brawling is pretty simplistic, but is very cinematic and makes you fell like a badass. The stealth portions are good and, again, make you feel like a badass. In short, this game makes you feel like Batman, a badass. I liked the demo. I’d like to play the full game when it comes out. Do I want to spend $50 on it? Well, that’s a bit thornier. $50 seems steep for this game; I’d pay $20 or even $30. Maybe I’ll wait for it to come down in price a bit. Or try to get it on Goozex.

Other things. Dungeon Delve, it turns out, is a fantastic resource, not just for the obvious reason of having 30 pre-made delves at your fingertips. If you pay attention, you can glean a lot about what makes a good encounter, not just in terms of what monsters to use together, but also how to use traps and terrain to make things interesting. Even less obvious but, I think, more interesting, the book shows you how to use your Dungeon Tiles in creative ways, using features on specific tiles to represent interesting and important terrain.

Also, as you may have discerned from previous session reports, an NPC has joined the group: Splug the fey goblin. I’m using homebrewed follower rules to represent him in the battles (I’m aware that the Dungeon Master’s Guide II includes official rules for this, and I’m eager to see how close I am to the mark). For those who are interested, here is a PDF of Splug’s statistics as well as the rules for using followers.

You may have noticed that the stats for Splug were made using Wizards’ own beta version of the Monster Builder. I absolutely love this tool. For a beta, it’s extremely functional and remarkably free of show-stopping bugs (not to say that there aren’t any, just to say that I haven’t run into anything too inconvenient). There’s clearly some work left to be done on it, but there’s a lot of potential there. More than that, there’s a lot of functionality and ease of use already built into it, which is a great boon to me, and to other DMs that like to make stuff up for their campaigns. Now I just need something like this for traps.

Martial Power: This book is just chocked full of D&D goodness. It’s mainly stuff for the players rather than the DM: new feats, new paragon paths, new epic destinies, and lots and lots of new powers. It’s all really good stuff, particularly the new builds for the fighter, warlord, ranger, and rogue. What’s interesting is that some of the powers and paragon paths allow you to branch out a little bit from your class’s role without actually multiclassing. The Guildmaster Thief paragon path is designed for the rogue (a striker), but most of its abilities are decidedly leader-ish. Also, the beastmaster ranger is very, very cool, and I like the idea that, when Wizards decides to incorporate companions, it’ll be on a class-by-class basis, allowing each class’s companion to be unique to that class. I’d imagine we’ll see a warlord build at some point with access to all sorts of followers, and I don’t think that a wizard build that utilizes a familiar is outside the realm of possibilities.

The Draconomicon: Where Martial Power is primarily for PCs, this book is all about cool stuff for the DM to use. The first chunk of stuff is all information on chromatic dragons: phyisiology, psychology, society, etc. It’s not game rules, but it’s really interesting to read, and I feel like a lot of it is useful for role-playing dragons. There are also draconic rituals, some traps, a lengthy section on hoard generation (which could easily be applied to generating any treasure hoard, not just one belonging to a dragon), nine sample lairs, and a bunch of draconic monsters, including new dragons and some lower-level threats, like kobolds. It’s good stuff.

Fallout 3: Wow. Just wow. I’m so hopelessly addicted to this game it’s not even funny. The formula feels a lot like a refinement of Oblivion, but it also feels distinctly like a Fallout game in many ways. There’s a lot of the trademark dark humor and some very interesting post-apocalyptic characters and scenarios. The quest design is fantastic; there’s almost always a twist that you don’t expect, even in relatively minor quests. The combat system (VATS), while not particularly deep (you usually want to shoot the head or, occasionally, the weapon) is fun and satisfying, and slow-motion ultra-gory kill shots never really get old.

Resident Evil 4: Very cool and creepy. I’m not all that far into it, as I’ve been mostly playing Fallout 3, but I am enjoying it quite a bit. I like the atmosphere and the story so far, and there have been some cool set-piece battles, too. I’m enjoying the controls (it should be noted that I have the Wii version, which allows you to aim with the remote) and the combat, and while the voice acting and translation is somewhat silly occasionally, it’s a good survival horror game through and through.

The Growing Hunger: This is the expansion for Last Night on Earth, which is one of my favorite games. The expansion adds some cool new scenarios, new characters to play, new cards for both the heroes and the zombies, and a bunch of optional rules that you can add in or not, as you like. I’ve only gotten a chance to play with the expansion once; I played the Plague Carriers scenario as the heroes, and just barely lost. It was a lot of fun, and it’s very cool to see seven additional zombies on the board.

A Touch of Evil: Another game by Flying Frog, the makers of LNoE. This time it’s a colonial-era supernatural horror game, which can be played competitively, cooperatively, or in teams as a hybrid of the two. It bears more than a passing similarity to both Arkham Horror and Runebound (both games that I enjoy quite a bit), but it’s a much simpler game than either and, once you’re used to it, can probably be played much faster than either. I’ve played it twice now, once with three friends cooperatively (it was fun and we vanquished the Vampire, though we found out later that we had neglected to use a few rules that would have made the game harder), and once on my own. Solo play is not officially supported in the rulebook, but it’s pretty easy to figure out how to do it regardless. I lost, not because the game was particularly difficult, but because the Shadow Track moved really quickly, and when it hits zero, it’s game over. There’s a debate online as to whether to use the competitive or cooperative rules when playing solo, and I feel now that a combination of the two should be used. I think that cooperative rules should be used for the Shadow Track and for the Town Elders, but I think that using the cooperative Mystery Phase Chart makes that Shadow Track move much too quickly, considering that having only a single player gives you little chance to counter its movement most of the time. I believe my game was over after about five or six turns, which seemed way too quick, and I feel like I didn’t really get to do much.

Well, that’s it for now. I may post about more stuff later.

We played a scenario called Plague Carriers. In that scenario, the zombie player has control of plague carrier zombies, which are tougher and automatically turn heroes into zombies when they kill them, but they can only move when heroes get close to them. The heroes have to kill all seven of them before sundown, or they lose. It was a very tense and exciting game. Early on I got a lot of great stuff; chainsaws, dynamite, shotguns, and other great weapons, as well as some nice first aid, and I killed three of the plague carriers pretty quickly. It looked like things were going my way, but my opponent was quietly stockpiling zombies in one corner of the board, where three of the plague carriers were. He then proceeded to pin me in the church for three or four rounds, which made me act a little desperately, especially since he managed to kill off two of my heroes (though they automatically replenish in this scenario). I made a dash for the last three plague carriers and managed to kill one of them, but lost another hero in the process. My newly spawned hero then went up to draw the last two carriers out so that I could blast them both with dynamite, but my plan backfired as the two plague carriers overwhelmed poor Sally and dragged her to her death. Game over, zombies win by killing off four heroes with 2 rounds left in the game.

At any rate, if anyone wants to see pictures of the event, my wife took some.

Something to note: if you play this game in single player, you’re not getting the full experience. It’s fun in single player, but not nearly as fun as playing with real people. The AI-controlled survivors are pretty useful; they have good aim and they’ll watch your back pretty effectively. They do not, however, take any sort of initiative like a human player will, and they also can’t use grenade items. That said, however, playing with even one other human player, especially if that player is someone you know, multiplies the game’s fun by a factor of 10. If you’ve got all four slots filled with people who know each other and gel as a team, you’re in for a real treat.

Also of note is that the versus mode, where one team plays the survivors while one plays the boss infected, is something of an acquired taste. I really didn’t like it that much the first time I played it. Playing the boss infected can be kind of frustrating at times; they die very quickly, and you have to wait 15-20 seconds to respawn. You don’t get to choose which kind of infected you spawn as, which can be irritating at times. Also, it can be hard to judge the range of an infected’s attack and, in the case of the smoker and the boomer, you have to wait a while for your attack to recharge if you miss. Playing a tank can be either very satisfying or also very frustrating; sometimes it feels like your big, meaty fists are going right through the survivors’ bodies without effect. When you get in a few good hits, though, you can really turn the tide of a match.

All that said, though, versus mode is starting to grow on me. I feel like I’m starting to get a better handle on how to play the infected; you have to be very patient and precise, and you have to coordinate both with your fellow boss infected and with the AI horde. You’re most effective when you wait until the survivors are distracted or panicking, then strike. If a smoker and a pair of hunters all strike at the same time during an infected rush, it can spell curtains for the survivors.

There’s also something to be said for playing the survivors against human opponents. They’ll often do things that the AI-controlled infected won’t do, and those things are often unexpected. It is, however, a very different game; there’s less continuity and it’s not quite as cinematic as campaign mode; in many cases, you won’t be making it through an entire level, but you’ll play the next level anyway.

At any rate, I think that there’s a lot of merit in both modes of play. It’s a great game, full of zombie-stomping fun, either way.

Second, I recently downloaded the beta version of the D&D Character Builder. I have to say, it’s very impressive. The program makes it really easy to make D&D characters, and it’s fantastic how they’ve got content from Dragon and other published products, like the Adventurer’s Vault right in there for you to use, even if you don’t own the physical product. It’ll automatically generate a character sheet for your character, which you can customize to a pretty great degree, and it’ll generate power cards, magic item cards, and reference cards for you, too. It’s pretty sweet.

It isn’t perfect, though; there are a few things it could use. The ability to create your own items would be really nice, since most DMs are going to be giving their PCs various things that aren’t in any published product. I’m not even talking about new weapons or magic items here; the ability to give a PC an item like “an old, tattered journal” or “a necklace depicting a skull with ram’s horns” would be fantastic. Similarly, it would be nice if you could edit the text in the character sheet and power cards. Most of it is pretty good, and there’s a lot of auto-calculation (though there could be more), but I would like to be able to type in my own notes in various places. There are also some issues with the personalized information that it puts on your power cards. The ranger’s Twin Strike, for example, allows you to attack with both your primary weapon and your off-hand weapon, but the power card only includes an attack bonus and damage for your primary weapon. It would be nice if your off-hand weapon were included, or if you could type that in yourself. Since many of the ranger’s powers allow you to attack with two weapons, this seems like a glaring omission.

It is, however, still in beta, and there’s time for it to be tweaked still. As it stands, even with a few things missing, it is a fantastic product, and when the full version comes out, I’ll be really happy to be a D&D Insider subscriber.

At first blush, the zombies appear like your garden-variety zombies; they shamble around aimlessly and don’t seem to intelligent. Well, the second part’s right; they really aren’t that smart (as you’d expect). But they don’t shamble around when they spot you; they charge at you, full speed ahead, like something out of 28 Days Later. Individually, they’re not that tough; a couple of shots will take one down. Trouble is you almost never run into them individually; it’s a full-on zombiepocalypse, and that means huge swarms of zombies rushing you from every direction. But that’s not even the worst part.

See, there are these boss zombies, infected that have somehow evolved beyond the rank-and-file undead. Smokers have long tongues that they use to lasso you with and then constrict you, and they blow up in a puff of smoke when you kill them. Hunters are super fast and super agile, and can pounce on you and rip you to shreds with their claws. Boomers are huge and fat, and can vomit on you; when they do this, it blurs your vision pretty severely, and attracts mobs of infected from every angle. Tanks are . . . well, they’re like the Hulk. They smash things. And they’re really, really tough. There are also witches, who sit in the dark and cry until you shoot them or shine a light on them, at which point they go absolutely batshit crazy and rip you to pieces.

I think what I like the most about the game is the sense of teamwork and camaraderie that the game fosters. Sticking together and watching each others’ backs isn’t just a good idea; it’s absolutely critical. separate from the group, and you will die a messy, painful death. Stick with the group, though, and you can watch out for each other, cover each other when you reload or heal up, and fend of the hordes of onrushing Zs with hails of bullets and shotgun shells. It’s absolutely awesome.

Now, the demo is only available for a few more days; once the game comes out, they’re turning it off. Originally I was kind of ticked about that, because I figured I probably wouldn’t be able to pick up the game until after Christmas sometime, if I didn’t get it for Christmas. But then my friends Chris and Tad decided to buy me an early Christmas present. So, when the demo runs out, zombie season officially opens. And I’ll be there, shotgun in hand.

Gamers is a movie about a gaming group about to break the world record for the most hours gamed, or some such thing; at least, that’s what it’s ostensibly about. In reality, it’s less about humor that gamers would enjoy, and more about frat-boy dick and fart jokes that constantly point out what big losers these gamers are. They fit into just about every stereotype that exists for RPG enthusiasts. If done tastefully, this would probably have come off as being charming and self-deprecating. As it is, it’s unfunny and mildly insulting. If you enjoy gaming, don’t rent it. If you enjoy movies, don’t rent it. If you enjoy dick and fart jokes, you might find something to like here.

First, a few words about the mechanics. As I’ve already said, they’re pretty simple. It’s a game that is easy to pick up and play quickly, and easy to teach. One or two players take control of the zombies, while one to four players take on the roles of the four heroes present in the game. Frequently the heroes have some goal to accomplish while the zombies are simply trying to stop them from reaching their goal, though sometimes this paradigm is reversed. There’s a lot of dice rolling, both for movement and combat, and there’s a lot of card play on both sides. Even the board is randomly generated, with a central Town Center tile and four L-shaped building tiles around the edges (six come with the game, so there will generally be two unused tiles during any given play).

Both sides have similarities, but it is the differences between the two that make the mechanics more interesting. Heroes are tougher and faster than zombies, but zombies are far more numerous. Heroes must search to get their cards (both events and items), spending precious time getting each one, while the zombie player’s hand is simply refreshed each turn. This encourages heroes to hoard their cards, saving them until they absolutely need them, while the zombies burn through their cards as quickly as possible, trying to get and maintain an advantage through relentless assault and constant de-buffing of the heroes. Combat is somewhat Risk-style, with zombies rolling one die and heroes rolling two (card play can increase this on both sides), and the highest single die roll winning the day (though zombies do win on ties). In play, zombies are relatively easy to fend off, but wind up being extremely difficult to kill; you see, if you simply beat the zombie’s roll, you fend it off and nothing happens. To kill a zombie, you must both beat the zombie’s roll and roll doubles, something that comes up rarely, unless the hero is able to roll more than two dice.

The mechanics, while interesting in their own right, are far from the strongest element of the game, however. Where this game excels is in the fact that it is thoroughly saturated with the theme that it sets out to capture: that is, the conceit that you’re playing through a zombie movie. While playing as the heroes, you often feel beleaguered and outnumbered, and sometimes downright hopeless. The zombies come in relentless hordes, and while heroes are more mobile than the zombies, the zombies are simply everywhere. The artwork and other components (including the CD soundtrack) all reinforce the zombie-movie feel; much of the artwork seems to be based off of actual photographs (though they are touched up somewhat), and it frequently depicts iconic zombie movie scenes. The cards, themselves, have great, thematic, and occasionally campy names, such as “Oh, The Horror”, “Braaiins”, “This Could Be Our Last Night On Earth”, and “Teen Angst”.

The game’s other chief strength is its replayability and ease of modification. The game is scenario-based, and comes with five scenarios out of the box. Other scenarios can be downloaded from Flying Frog’s website, as well as the fan community, and the game’s expansion packs also come with scenarios. It seems pretty easy to create your own content, and Flying Frog even includes a number of components that are not used in any of the scenarios that come with the game; these components are intended to be used for your own scenarios.

The components, themselves, are of very high quality for the most part. While I’d like the boards themselves to be slightly sturdier stock, they do the job, and all of the punch-out chits are quite sturdy, themselves. The cards are the thick, laminated variety, and while they can stick together sometimes, this is easily remedied by bending the cards back and forth before separating them for the first time. Also included are thick, attractive hero and scenario cards, an abundance of small dice, and a turn reference card for each player (six in all, double-sided).

One cautionary word, though, regards the high degree of luck in the game. The board is randomized, there’s a lot of dice rolling, a lot of card play, and you can even draw random heroes and a random scenario. With all this chance, it’s easy to see your best-laid strategies fall apart due to a lucky card draw or roll of the dice by another player. Some people may not like this. Personally, I think it reinforces the zombie movie theme, and typically the game doesn’t last more than an hour anyway, so having a high-luck game doesn’t, in my opinion, pose much of a problem.

The Good: Few games nail their theme as well as this one does. If you like zombies, you’ll probably love Last Night on Earth. The quality of the game components is also a huge benefit, as is the ease with which the game can be modified and added to. Not only that, but it’s just a fun game, period.

The Bad: Some may not like the abundance of luck-based mechanics within the game. If you’re looking for deep strategy, you may want to look elsewhere. Also, if you’re not a fan of the zombie genre, this probably isn’t the game for you.

The Bottom Line: I love Last Night on Earth. It’s a fun, quick-playing, theme-saturated game with an easy learning curve and a lot of great-looking bits. If you like zombie movies, you’ll probably like this game. Otherwise, it may not be for you. It is, however, clearly a labor of love.

Settlers of Catan was the first game I played, and it was the second time I had played it. It was fun. I like the strategy of the game; even if you’re unfamiliar with it, strategies have a way of revealing themselves to you as you play. I got a settlement near some sheep early on, and also got a sheep-trading port. Through some lucky die rolls, I wound up getting tons and tons of sheep, which I promptly traded for resources that I needed more. I feel like maybe I should have bought a few more development cards, and I ultimately lost, but I had fun and I’d like to play again.

The Great Brain Robbery is a game that I actually own, and have played a couple of times before. It’s a fun diversion about zombies in the wild west robbing a passenger train full of government cheese (as zombies sometimes do). I like the game, but I think I’d get pretty tired of it if I played it too much. Still, it was a fun time.

Royal Turf is a game about betting on horse racing. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it at first, but it actually turned out to be a good little game. There’s a significant luck component with the racing of the actual horses, as well as some strategy and bluffing involved with the actual betting. Do you bet on the stable horse, or the crazy horse? Should you bet on the horse in first position, or maybe one further back that’s a bit faster sometimes?

The highlight of the night, however, was Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game, which we played twice. I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while now, and I was extremely excited to actually get to. On the first play through we had the full six players (two zombie players and four hero players); I played on the side of the heroes. We played the “Save the Townsfolk” scenario, in which the heroes have to survive the night with at least four townsfolk cards between them. We won, primarily I think because the zombies made some tactical errors (which was probably because nobody had ever played the game before), in that the horded their cards. Card-hording is a great strategy if you’re a hero, but for zombies, you generally want to use as many of your cards as you possibly can every turn, because your hand will be fully replenished at the beginning of your next turn.

In the second game we only had three players. I played as the zombies, while my to friends played as two heroes each. This game, I think, was more satisfying because we were more used to the rules. It was definitely more of a challenge for the heroes. We played the “Escape in the Truck” scenario, which encourages holing up in one location a lot less than “Save the Townsfolk” does. Also unlike the first scenario, if the time limit runs out, the zombies win rather than the heroes winning, so the heroes are fighting the clock. I had some good spawning rolls in the beginning, and wound up with my full compliment of zombies by the second or third round. I also burned through my cards as quickly as I could, and discarded cards that I couldn’t use immediately, and I think that helped a lot. There was one rule that I think we played incorrectly. According to the rules, I believe, any time a hero player loses his last hero, that hero returns as a zombie hero. We were playing such that every hero death resulted in a zombie hero, which I think was incorrect with two hero players (but would have been correct with four). I’m not entirely sure it influenced the outcome of the game, as there are numerous cards that I discarded that would have possibly netted me zombie heroes anyway, and I was killing heroes off at a prodigious rate without a lot of help from my zombie heroes. In the beginning, it seemed that the heroes might win, because the drew Keys and Gasoline right away (both items that they needed to bring to the truck in order to escape). However, I had some lucky card draws and managed to mob the truck and drive the heroes with the pertinent items into a building, then proceeded to corner them and kill them off one by one, forcing them to discard their keys and gasoline. In the end, I won because the round limit expired before the heroes could escape. We had also managed to go through every single hero character, with only two remaining heroes at the end of the game. It was a very good time, and I fully intend to buy this game as soon as I can; I can’t wait to play it again.

My friend Chris showed me Set. While I recognize the potential for this set-finding game to be a lot of fun it is, unfortunately, not particularly friendly to the color-blind community. I mean, come on; red, green, and purple? Were you guys even trying? How hard would it have been to make the colors something more easily to distinguish, like blue, red, and black?

We also played Bang!. I like the theme, and I can see how it would be fun with a large group, but with three players it pretty much falls flat. It is technically playable with three, but it really isn’t that interesting. Also, some of the cards are simply broken with only three, where you already know who is in which role (and thus, who to kill). Willy the Kid can use any number of Bang! cards on his turn, while everyone else is restricted to one. This meant that our first game ended before I even got a chance to act, because the Tad (playing Willy) had more than enough Bang! cards to finish me off and there was nothing I could do. Not a fun outcome, really, but I’d be willing to try the game again with, say, five or six players.

We played some DS games, too. New Super Mario Bros. has some minigames which are kind of fun, but I wasn’t really all that impressed by them. Mario Kart, on the other hand, is a blast in multiplayer.

Finally (actually, this is the first game we played yesterday), we played D&D Miniatures, which I got for my birthday. We played using the starter set and one Dungeons of Dread booster pack, for a total of thirteen minis, not all of which were used. We had two 100-point warbands with two players on a side, and we played on the Dwarven Ruins map. It was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to play this game again, and to get more minis. The sculpts themselves are pretty good for the most part, though some are better than others. The grick, for example, has a pretty unimpressive paint job, while the young green dragon and the balhannoth look fantastic. As far as the actual gameplay, this is one of those strongly exception-based games where you have to play it a couple of times before synergies between minis start to reveal themselves. We disregarded alignment and faction restrictions because we otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to construct very big warbands, so some of our synergies probably weren’t tournament-legal. That said, the yuan-ti swiftscale combined with the dwarven battlemaster is a pretty devastating combo, even if it isn’t strictly legal due to opposing alignments. I also think that the dire wolf and goblin picador go well together, though by the time the poor goblin was able to immobilize something for the wolf, the wolf had already died.

I’ve already created a number of quests for Keep on the Shadowfell, so that I can hand out carrots that draw the PCs toward the parts of the adventure that (I think) are interesting and fun. But what’s really got me excited are the personal quests. See, I gave my players homework. I told them that I wanted them each to come up with a short-term goal for their characters, and that I’d turn that goal into a minor quest. The stuff they came up with is really great, and helps to flesh out their characters quite a lot more. Even better, it gives me an inclination of what they’re interested in doing in the future, which will make it that much easier to create adventures that engage them once KotS is done. I plan on telling them that, any time they think of something important that they’d like their character to do, they can tell me and I’ll make up a personal quest for them. I think that this sort of feedback and shared storytelling is important to RPGs, and it tickles me that D&D is finally incorporating it into the core rules. If you read through the Dungeon Master’s Guide it actually becomes clear that not only are they incorporating it, they’re actively encouraging it. It’s great.

The thing that got me thinking about all this and how cool it is was actually a conversation I had with one of my players over IM. He was the only one who hadn’t given me a personal quest yet, and it kind of felt like he didn’t really have any idea who his character was, other than a race-class combination. So I pestered him about it, and he asked for help. I asked him some questions about his character, and he answered them as best he could. Eventually we came up with a quest for him (a really cool one, too), but what’s even better is that I really feel like his character has become a unique individual, completely differentiated from all the other members of that particular race-class combination. You could actually see the character growing and taking shape in between the lines of text in the IM window, and I’ve gotta say, it’s a pretty rockin’ character. (Don’t worry, I think all of you other guys have pretty rockin’ characters, too.)

The social encounters were a breeze to create, and were a lot of fun, too. The skill challenge system allows for a lot of customization, such that these two encounters, both of which are basically negotiations, have different uses for the same, and different, skills. There are a couple of things that I really like about the tools given to craft non-combat encounters. First and foremost, I love the fact that I get to reward the PCs for their choice of skills, and encourage them to pick up more skills. If you read the Player’s Handbook, it’s not immediately apparent that skills have become more important in 4th Edition. Sure, the rogue has a lot of powers that key off of skills, and some of the other classes have utility powers that improve skill use, but it almost seems like an afterthought. Until you read the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and it all clicks into place. Between skill challenges and terrain effects, there are lots of ways for a DM who is so inclined to reward skill use in 4th Edition. When crafting these encounters, I made sure to include at least one skill that each PC had, so that everyone could feel useful, but I also included some other skills that nobody has, to nudge the PCs into picking up the Skill Training feat a couple of times in the future. I love that I have a tool to do that with.

The other thing that I like about the skill challenge system is that it gives me a way to take something like a negotiation and create an actual mechanical encounter out of it, with plenty of role-playing as well as plenty of die-rolling, and an XP reward at the end. Suddenly, non-combat encounters have become just as important as combat encounters.

The combat encounter that I created took a little bit more time, but it was still pretty easy, and it really served to highlight for me the things that I like about 4th Edition encounter and monster design.

Monster design in 4th Edition is great. Monsters are tactically and thematically interesting, with mechanics that both inform and are informed by the flavor of the monster. I also really like the idea behind minions, as well as the other end of the spectrum: elites and solos. I put a bunch of minions in this encounter, a couple of standard monsters, and an elite. The fight, itself, will be big, but I don’t think it will be difficult for me to manage.

Another thing that I like about monsters in 4th Edition is that they’re really easy to customize. Only one of the monsters that I used in the fight is straight out of the monster manual. The others have all be tweaked in some way. For the elite, I took a different elite, changed out some powers and characteristics, and reduced its level to be more in line with a 1st-level party. There are four different monster types in the fight, three of which have been customized, and it took me maybe 20 to 30 minutes to do the customization work for all three. Not too bad, really, when you compare it to 3rd Edition.

Something that I really like about encounter design in general is that terrain is a lot more important than it used to be. There are some really fantastic rules for creating terrain in the DM’s guide, and the DCs and Damage by Level chart on page 42 is absolutely invaluable for scattering all kinds of improvised attacks around the encounter for the PCs to make use of.

All in all, I’m very happy with encounter design in 4th Edition. There’s some work involved, but it feels like you get a lot of bang for your buck. And, truth to be told, I find the work to be a lot of fun in and of itself.