So, Star Wars: Imperial Assault hit every single geek button I have.  Board game: check.  Star Wars: check.  Miniatures: check.  Takes less time than Risk: check.   I remember being in the game store, staring at the box for what must have been 5 minutes.  My wife had to shake me from the daze.  The downside was the price, nearly $120 smackers.  Which is odd, because I had spent more earlier in the week on a single family dinner at a restaurant and this board game could be seen as an investment.  So I did some research.

You will be mine!

Turns out, it’s more or less a skin-job on Descent 2^nd edition, which I already own.  Now, Descent is awesome but it’s competitive.  Like the old Hero’s Quest games, or D&D, someone has to take the mantle of the bad guy.  I don’t mind this aspect but for 2 players, with only myself as having any experience in this sort of stuff, it’s not terribly practical.  A co-operative game means I can help the other team mates learn about the game and the meta strategies.  So for now, SW:IA is on the backburner.

So I kept looking around and 2 games were recommended, and both were Kickstarters.  Shadows of Brimstone and Galaxy Defenders.  Both were similar to Descent but were cooperative, so I bought both.  Galaxy Defenders arrived rather quickly and my daughters and I set it up for a round.

First off, having a 2 year-old and a 4 year-old help you remove punch-out cardboard items is a hoot.  It’s like Christmas, when you get a couple packages with bubble wrap and kids go nuts.  They were going crazy punching out these little tags (and not paying attention to where they landed) and were sad when there were none left.  There were many pieces.

So many pieces!

It took about 20 minutes to sort it all out.  Then another 20 to set up the first mission and quickly read the rules of engagement.  My 2 yr old was done by this point, a little late in the night but my 4yr old was super keen to get playing.  It was a “are we there yet?” night.

Board is all set, I have the basic rules and we get going.  I drastically simplified the strategic rules (there are like 8 major steps per turn, I went down to 2) and my daughter and I went full in.  We each selected a random hero and started moving around the board.  Aliens (always aliens) have a neat AI system dictated by the distance from players.  Each side has some interesting quirks, related to dice rolls.  There’s a basic hit, a crit, a gun jam, a reroll, defense and lost ammo to consider.  Bonuses and penalties based on the rolls.  Sometimes you get really lucky, sometimes things go really bad.

We traded blows for about 30 minutes, allowing me to learn the flow of combat and her to practice her arithmetic.  When you combine a dice roll, boosts, penalties, armor and subtract from hit points, I think that’s grade 10 math right there.  We only stopped because she started nodding off between die rolls and she’s been talking about playing again ever since.

Once the squirts were asleep and my wife was away doing some work, I decided to play the first mission solo, and play it proper.  I took an hour or so to read all the manuals, line by line.  I ran through a round in my head, then I decided to give it a shot.

Sure enough, I missed a couple steps in the first few rounds but I eventually got the hand of it.  I selected a tank character and a glass cannon to get through.  The enemy scales based on player group size, so I wanted to keep it manageable.  Things went well enough to start as there are goals to attempt to complete.  The AI is there as a hurdle but not so much as punishment, so it isn’t like staving off failure rather than trying to succeed (which apparently is a fault with the X-COM boardgame).

I hit the mid stride and then the RNG gods started laughing at me.  I was rolling 4-6 die to attack and missing every single one, while the enemy was rolling aces.  I went through at least 3 rounds of no progress on my side and the enemy finding more reinforcements.  Things were looking grim.  A couple of lucky rolls though, and some good timing of skill use and I was able to take out some threats to move forward.

On my last turn, where I thought I had completed everything and was waiting for the clock to tick down, I drew a card that summoned 4 enemies.  The way the game works is that enemies only attack after you activate, so even though they were on the board, they were just staring at me on my way to victory.

Even with so many pieces, the game itself is pretty straightforward. It’s a little math heavy with the die rolls but the rest is pretty obvious to play through.  This weekend I hope to have a solid session with my wife.  She’s pretty good at picking things up on the fly and as long as I have the tough questions answered in my head, it should go smoothly.  And of course, another few games with the eldest child are due.  Seems my New Year’s resolution is working out.

So, H1Z1 has “launched” in “early access”.  Or more specifically, SoE has had people pay to get into open beta.  Enough relating to the previous post it’s actually painful.

Anyways, onto the fun part of SoE simply being SoE.  H1Z1 was originally sold as a zombie sandbox in a F2P market that would avoid many of the pure P2Win issues.  Specifically, in a survival game, the material/weapons you get are the way you define and continue to progress.

So first this.

Then this.

Then this from Smed himself.

I don’t really have a whole lot to add to this debacle, other than the title of this post.  Curious as to what Keen will have to say about this, given he’s been the largest blogger proponent I’ve come across for the game while also the biggest hater of F2P/P2W games.  Maybe another Allods post is incoming?

They’re the devil I tell you, the devil!

I won’t lie, I used to like pre-orders.  They made sense in a physical world, where limited copies were a problem.  I want the game on that day dammit, what do you mean you’re out?

Then the interwebs came around, Steam made digital distribution the norm and pre-orders morphed.  It has absolutely zero to do with reserving a copy.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Some might say “well I can pre-install and get to play at midnight”.  Then pre-order the night before if that actually means something to you.

And exclusives for pre-orders have to stop.  This is horribad as they are often exclusive to a separate platform.  Best Buy gives you this, Steam gives you that, GMG gives another thing.  None of it is available after launch.  Blargh.

Paying for Beta

And let’s get something else straight.  Anyone who is paying a company to beta (hell, alpha) test their product is an idiot and part of the problem.  I’m not talking about Kickstarter, where these are small companies looking for capital.  I’m talking about SoE charging people for Landmark and doing nothing with it.  I’m talking about Steam Early Access.  I’m talking about Blizzard taking your money during Alpha for HotS.

I know a lot of bloggers opted into Landmark.  I know of none that still play.  I also know the game hasn’t launched.

Incomplete Games

This is in part due to the “get it out the door to make money” problem that’s always existed but it’s compounded with pre-orders.  See, when you buy a pre-order it’s a contract with the developer to release on a specific date.  If they miss that date, you’re eligible for a refund, without question.  Even if the pre-order says they can slip a date, by law in most countries, they have to give you a return.  This is why kickstarters can delay, you’re not paying for the product, you’re giving money to the company, and as a bonus, getting access to the game.

We wouldn’t have had Sims4, Diablo3, SimCity, CoD4, Dragon Age, Halo Collection and AC:Unity if people stopped pre-ordering.  Well maybe they still would have shipped as shit but they wouldn’t have been paid for it.  It seems like most games today have a day 1 patch that fixes a mile-long list of bugs.

Just Wait a Bit

Seriously people, just wait a couple weeks after release.  Sure, you might miss out on some of the leveling experience but here’s what you gain.

• Less bugs than launch, likely 2 patches in
• A more stable network
• A downstream economy (things cost less)
• A better community review
• In today’s world, a sale

With online games, often times they will undergo drastic changes in just a few short patches.  Granted, sometimes it takes longer.  Diablo 3 today is nearly unrecognizable to what was launched, aside from the art and story.  SimCity is offline.  Unity has faces.  DA:I has hair.

Vote With Your Wallet

It really isn’t complex.  Companies do things if people pay them to do it.  They will continue to do it and try to charge more for less work.  They need to make money to survive and that’s part of the deal.  Selling you a promise is what snake oil is for; selling you a product is a separate matter.

You work hard for your money, so should the person trying selling you something.

So a bit more meat around Pandemic in this post.  Basics first.  Co-operative board game, run with cards, peons and disease cubes.  Players are randomly assigned a role that has particular features at the start of the game.  Each turn, players can move, attempt to cure a disease or run an action from their role.  They then pick up 2 more player cards, of which you can only have 7 in the hand at any time (more on this later).  Finally, they infect additional cities based on a separate set of cards.

Game ends with 1 of 4 conditions

• All diseases cured – players win
• No more disease cubes to distribute – players lose
• No more player cards available – players lose
• 8^th outbreak – players lose

Games get more complex/challenging with more “bad” cards inserted into the decks, and with more players.

Roles

The core game has a few simple roles, such as Medic that can remove diseases in a city quickly, or a Quarantine Specialist that prevents further outbreaks.  Each has a particular strength and most are related directly to their location on the game board.  Others, like the Contingency Planner or the Operations Expert, allow for better card management, which is great for the late game.

The best role however is the Scientist.  They only need 4 cards to cure a disease (5 for everyone else) which has a very large impact when you can only have 7 cards in your hand.  Someone who can control the disease outbreaks and someone who can research faster make for a very different game.  This heavily favors 4 player games to get the “better” roles, where a 2 player game can be very challenging if you only get card-management roles.

Curing Diseases

As this is the goal of the game it’s also the simplest and most complex portion.  There are 4 groupings of 12 cities, associated by colors.  You need 5 cards of the same color and be on a research station (starts with 1, can add as you go) to cure a disease.  You only need 4 as a Scientist.  Since you’re limited to 7 cards, that means you can only focus on one color at a time and need to strategically discard.  If too many people discard the same color, you can really get into a bind where it’s impossible (or close) to cure a disease and automatically fail the game due to lack of player cards in the pile.

More to this, if you have multiple players your cards are more dispersed.  Maybe player 4 gets the card that player 2 needs.  In order to do an exchange, both need to be on the city named on the card at the same time (outside of a particular role).  That could be half way across the board, far away from a research station.  And when you exchange that card, the person who receives has to discard immediately to stay within the 7 card cap.

It’s really akin to actual crisis management, where you have to concentrate on key activities and let the smaller fires burn, hoping they don’t become large emergencies.

Epidemics

Randomly inserted into the player card deck are epidemics, which cause a proliferation of a disease in a given city.  If there’s too much disease, then it spreads – called an outbreak.  I’d say this is the case 80% of the time.  Once you place the disease cubes you then reshuffle the infection cards already discarded and put them back on top of the deck.  This compounds issues as you’ve already infected these cities and they get back to top of pile.  If you can remember what’s in the discard pile, you can attempt to prevent further outbreaks.

Easy games have 4 epidemics, hard ones have 6.  They drastically alter the board as if you run out of disease cubes or have too many outbreaks, you lose.  Sometimes things look peachy and one bad draw can have massive ripple effects.

Multiplayer Complexity

This is a fairly interesting point as complexity is often defined by variables needing to fit a static structure of defined limits.  A DPS check is you needing to do X DPS in Y minutes.  More often, you need to do W dance, control X add and use skill Z at the right time.  The more of those variables, the more complex the event.

Pandemic is structured in that it has 48 cities, 8 events, and X (4-6) epidemic cards in the Player pile.  Each player picks 2 per round, so you’re limited in potential total actions.  More players mean that the cards are more dispersed, making it more challenging to actually cure a disease.  With 2 players, it’s a 50% chance that you’ll get your card, only 25% chance in a 4 player game (actually chances are much different but this is napkin math for now).  So the more players you have, the more complex it becomes to win.  Conversely, it becomes easier to play.  More bodies means more people to control the outbreaks and infections.  There are the same amount of events as they are fixed per round but having 4 people on the board means you can control 100% more cities.

And the starting conditions are also based on player count.  With 7 roles in the starter game and only 2 players, you’re unlikely to see a Scientist.  But that’s ok, because the win condition complexity is lower.  With 4 players, odds are you’ll get at least 2 solid roles to assist with the win.  Though if you get a 4 player game without the Scientist or say, the Medic, then you’re in for a rather interesting time.

Strategy

Contrary to other games board, the initial set up is not a fixed point.  Sometimes you are dealt a really good hand, sometimes a really bad one.  You can’t build a deck either, so each card selection is pretty random.  Bad hands + random = worse hands.  This is often a problem with competitive board games, where one player gets a solid card advantage and unless there’s an error in play, or a miracle card is picked, they have the game on lock.  Co-operative is different as everyone wins or loses together, so it behooves the rest of the team to assist a weak hand.

Pandemic works because the element of randomness is offset by your group strategy and tactics.  4 people tackling an outbreak is much different than you alone, and the game turns meta very quickly.  Instead of considering your actions this turn, you need to think of the impact on the next few players and what you need for the next turn.

Quite a lot of fun and certainly recommended.