Last night, I went to Delaware to see R. A. Salvatore at Borders for a question/answer session and a book signing. He (and his son Geno) were there to promote their new books. The Salvatores put on a good show, they answered some good questions, and I got my copy of Homeland signed, which was nice. The highlight, I think, was R. A. Salvatore telling his “Wubba Wubba” story, which I had never heard before. Check it out if you like D&D and have no idea what I’m talking about; you’ll be glad you did.

Ok, so I’ve been playing Tiny Adventures on Facebook for a while now. While I think it’s an amusing little diversion, I don’t feel like it does a great job of marketing or promoting D&D. It’s just too dissimilar from D&D to work as a marketing tool, in my opinion. Someone who knows nothing of D&D and plays Tiny Adventures, expecting a preview of the RPG, is going to come away with an impression of a game that’s extremely random, a little boring, full of randomized loot (most of which you can’t use and have to sell), and in which you really have very little control over what happens to your in-game avatar. D&D is not those things, and there’s a lot of great stuff in D&D that doesn’t make the jump to Tiny Adventures at all. I think the worst offender, though, is that your choice of race and class acts as a strait-jacket more than anything else. Most of your prowess as an adventurer seems to come from your gear, and your class (not so much your race, which barely matters) simply serves to limit the gear available to you. Like I said, I enjoy playing with Tiny Adventures for about five minutes or so per day, but as a way to promote D&D, I think it does the exact opposite.

My friend Chris came over last night and we did some gaming before he leaves for Spain. First we played Last Night on Earth, which I’ve already reviewed for you. This time, however, we played one of the official downloadable scenarios, “All Hallows Eve”. In “All Hallows Eve”, the townsfolk are scattered around the board in random buildings, and one of them is secretly the Zombie Master, controlling the zombies with the Book of the Dead. The heroes have to interrogate each townsfolk until the Zombie Master is revealed, then defeat the Zombie Master, take the Book of the Dead, and burn it. I played the heroes in this one, and wound up finding the Zombie Master pretty quickly. I also wound up losing a couple of my heroes pretty quickly, though, and one of them became a zombie hero to boot. A well-placed gasoline marker killed the Zombie Master, the zombie hero, and an additional zombie, dropping the Book of the Dead in that space. All I needed was a fire item to destroy it; unfortunately, the one guy who had a fire item–Jake Cartwright, the drifter–had been killed a few rounds prior. I tried to get into the police station so that one of my remaining heroes could hold of the hordes with a pump shotgun while the other searched for fire, but my heroes got separated and poor Sheriff Anderson was overwhelmed, ending the game with a win for the Zs. It was a lot of fun, and I’d definitely play the scenario again.

After that we played Pillars of the Earth, which I’ve played three times now. I like this game a lot. It’s a game about building a cathedral, and it’s based on a novel so there’s a sort of narrative built into the game that separates it from other, similar games. There’s a lot of resource management and allocation that figures into winning the game, and while there is some randomness, there isn’t so much that it’ll ruin your long-term strategies; more likely, your opponent will do that.

Finally, on the Team Fortress 2 front, I’ve started playing around with the medic class. I tried the medic when I first started playing and found the class not to my liking; I didn’t have a good sense of who to heal and when. However, now that I’ve got 50+ hours under my belt and I know a little bit more about the optimal strategies in the game, I feel like I’ve got a much better handle on the medic and how he works. I’m having a lot of fun playing the medic, much more than I thought I would. Even better, I actually seem to be pretty good at playing the medic, which is gratifying. It’s a useful class to have some experience with, as there are few occasions when you have too many medics, and they are one of the most important classes for victory on any map. I’ve even managed to get the first unlockable, the Blutsauger, which is a needlegun that heals you 3 points for every hit, but can’t score critical hits. Pretty useful, in any case.

Something that has struck me about the core gameplay of the medic class is how the game incentivizes you to heal your buddies. In addition to making them more effective and even boosting their health beyond the norm, healing carries other benefits. The medic normally regenerates about 1 health per second, but when you’re healing someone that regeneration doubles. Also, while you’re healing an ally, you get credit for an assist any time that ally kills an enemy, which means that you can rack up a lot of points if you’re healing the right people. Probably most importantly, though, is the fact that as you’re healing people, you build up your Übercharge which, when fully charged, can be deployed to give you and your healing target ten seconds of invulnerability, an ability that makes medics extremely useful if they stay alive long enough.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Team Fortress 2 for a while now, but I keep on playing it instead. For those who haven’t played it, let me sum up: it’s really, really good. A brief primer: TF2 is a mulitplayer, team-based first-person shooter with objective-based gameplay and nine classes to choose from, each of which brings something different to the table and each of which plays very differently from the others. The classes are all really well balanced, too. The spy, for example, could be seen as extremely powerful with his ability to become invisible, disguise himself as the enemy, and kill people instantaneously with a knife in the back. However, if you’ve got pyros who know what they’re doing, they’ll be flaming their teammates frequently and, since there is no friendly fire, only enemy spies will catch aflame, and they’re pretty weak when caught out in the open.

It’s rare for me to find a multiplayer game that holds my attention for more than a month, but TF2 has really managed to do it. I’ve been playing since about Christmas time, and I have no plans of stopping any time soon. I love the variety in the classes, and in the fact that a single level never really plays out the same twice. My favorite class in TF2 is the heavy, and it’s the class I’m best with. The heavy is big, tough, slow, and packs a minigun. He can deal a lot of damage pretty quickly if left unchecked, but he winds up being a preferred target for spies and snipers, which leads to a high mortality rate, and heavies don’t tend to last all that long without a medic, either. Second on my list (a very close second, at that) is the pyro. I love the pyro’s mobility, as well as his ability to jump amidst the enemy and sow pure chaos. He’s not the antithesis of the heavy, but he’s very, very different in play. I also like playing the demoman from time to time, lobbing grenades and sticky bombs with wild abandon.

The genius of what Valve is doing with this game, though, is the fact that they’re still supporting it after release. They release new maps, they tweak the gameplay and, best of all, they release class-based achievement packs with unlockables. It works like this: they release a bunch of achievements–little goals for you to work toward, for those who aren’t familiar with this concept–and as you get achievements, you unlock alternate weapons for your class. These weapons aren’t patently better than the ones you start with, but they do offer slightly different strategies and styles of play, which is nice, and they allow for some customization of your chosen class. They’ve released three so far: the medic, the pyro, and the heavy. I’m not much for playing the medic, but I’ve managed to get all of the unlockables for the pyro and the heavy, and they all have merit.

The pyro can replace his shotgun with a flare gun. The flare gun does less damage, but sets enemies alight from a distance, which can be very useful for the aforementioned chaos-sowing. Then there’s the backburner, a replacement for the flamethrower that is functionally similar except that it can’t fire the standard flamer’s compressed air blast (used for pushing people around or reflecting projectiles) and deals automatic critical hits from behind. Finally, there’s the axtinguisher, a replacement for the axe that deals less damage but does critical damage to foes on fire.

The heavy has probably my favorite alternate “weapon”, the sandvich, which replaces the shotgun. It’s not really a weapon; it doesn’t deal damage. It does, however, heal you when you eat it, though it makes you extremely vulnerable for the four seconds that it takes to eat it. Then there’s Natascha, the minigun replacement, which deals less damage but slows enemies under fire. Finally there are the KGB, the Killing Gloves of Boxing, which replace the heavy’s normal fist attack. They’re slower, but if you kill someone with them you get five seconds of gauranteed crits.

I am continually surprised with how much I love this game. I rave about it to my friends and play whenever I get the chance. If you haven’t tried it yet, and you like multiplayer FPSs at all, you need to try it. You owe it to yourself.

Spore. Ah, Spore. I’ve been looking forward to the game for a while. It’s an intriguing concept: a game where you create and evolve a creature into a whole race of creatures, from a single-celled organism all the way up to a space-faring race, with complete creative control. Sounds like fun, right? If you’ve clicked the link, you may have already noticed that it only received one star on Amazon.com. With such a cool premise, why is it rated so badly? Was it poorly executed? Not from what I’ve heard. No, it’s another problem altogether.

Sadly, Spore is saddled with some pretty restrictive DRM. In short, it allows you to install the game three times, ever. Period. Want to install it a fourth time? Buy a new copy and throw out your old one, because it’s a coaster now (or a Frisbee, if you prefer). Want to get one of your installs back by uninstalling? You can’t. Sorry. Why did EA do this? Ostensibly, they did it to prevent piracy. The thing is, this game showed up on BitTorrent sites before it was even released, so apparently it didn’t even fulfill its purpose. This means that those who want to pirate the game can, with very little effort on their part, while those who buy the game legitimately are treated to a heavy-handed reminder that EA doesn’t trust its customers. EA has effectively just alienated the entire hard-core gaming market. Those people who upgrade their PCs every six months to a year? Yeah, they might have bought the game. They won’t now, because eighteen months down the line they won’t be able to play the game they bought anymore.

It really baffles me. EA had to know that this wouldn’t really do anything to prevent piracy, because Mass Effect had the exact same DRM, and it’s been pirated plenty. With that in mind, wouldn’t it have made more sense to put a simple disc check on the game, save money licensing the DRM, and sell more copies? It seems simple.

In the end, I’m faced with a decision, as are many others who want this game but don’t want to deal with the DRM. Either I buy the game and get treated like a criminal, or I pirate the game and I’m not. On the one hand, I want to support Maxis for making such an interesting and innovative game. On the other hand, I want to send a clear message to EA that this kind of DRM is not okay with me, and the clearest way to talk to a giant corporate entity like that is with your dollars. What does everyone else think?

There are a lot of games out there with interesting mechanics, deep strategy, potent themes, and plenty of replayability. Flying Frog’s Last Night on Earth does not meet all of these criteria: the mechanics are fairly simple, and while some strategy exists within the game, luck can play just as big a role, if not a bigger role, at times. It does have one of the most well-implemented themes I’ve come across in a board game, and its modular structure and simple mechanics make it easy to modify and create your own content, making it extremely replayable.

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.

Wizards of the Coast have written a formal response to Mr. Goldfarb, and mailed it off to him. I say, “Great job.”

On Thursday, I went ahead and ordered Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game. I liked it so much when I played it that I just couldn’t resist. It’s slated to arrive on Tuesday, and I’ve already got plans to play it with a friend on Wednesday. Awesome.

I mentioned yesterday that Wizards had created Tiny Adventures, a D&D app for Facebook. I also mentioned that it was a bit buggy; specifically, adventures were not updating for me, and I kept on getting errors. Well, here’s the response that Wizards posted to yesterday’s antics, and it is awesome:

5pm Thursday, August 21st

Your Server was exploring the dungeon and preparing to battle the mighty dragon when it encountered a horde of good-looking, expert Tiny Adventure players.

Your Server made a server load check with a difficulty of 3700 . . . and rolled 1

Your Server was dominated by the exited players and its CPU was trampled. Your Server headed back to the shop to purchase a huge upgrade for itself and will be back tomorrow. The horde of players was thanked again for their enthusiasm and patience.

Please check back tomorrow afternoon (Friday August 22nd).

I’ll be checking back later today, in the hopes that I can actually try it out. It really does sound like a cool little diversion.

I went out for a marathon gaming session last night, and managed to play four games, two of which I’d played before. In the order that I played them:

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.