Media Months in Review – September 2014 – February 2015 – Games and Books

The intention is to post these monthly. Since I haven’t posted these in a while though, I’m going to split the last half year’s media consumption post into several parts. This one will focus on games(video games, board games, card games), and books (also manga and comics). I’ll give a paragraph or so for every show I have what to say of.

Video Games:

Diablo 3 is all about the loot. Taken during patch 2.1.1, those 4 Furnaces, damn.

Diablo 3 – The big elephant in the room. I’ve spent over 800 hours on the game over the recent months. It had consumed me, at least for the first 2-3 months, where every single free moment of my time was spent on it. I barely watched anime, even. The drive for loot was strong. I’m now slowly winding down my time with it. Both because the gameplay isn’t all that good, and because I realize the only goal you play it for is to get items that make you faster at obtaining items. The “end-game” content is truly lacking, and the only thing worse than the end-game content is pre-end-game content, which just feels bad. Though the basic leveling in terms of levels feels good.

Media Month in Review – January 2010.

Well, this month had school, school, and some more school. Anime offerings were a bit sparse, but I made up for it elsewhere. I think this month I’ll make a separate post again for the monetary expenditures, heh. I think I’ll give some items here a bit more details.

This is one of the main sections of the Basterds, who are not really the main characters, if you ask me. It also makes you think (if you watch it in an inquisitive mindset), about who’re “The good guys”.

Movies:

Infernal Contraption Card-game – Advanced Mutual Solitaire [Updated]

I’ll cover the board game known as Infernal Contraption by Privateer Press in this post. I use the definition “card-game” even though it’s a non-collectible card-game, ala Munchkin, which I think is really a “board-game”; I hope you can bear with that. Furthermore, I’ll tell you the general gist of this post: We did not enjoy this game much.

 

This is a “Things I Like” post, so the review is more me covering opinions than describing the thing blow by blow, and all the rules.

Settlers of Catan – Benchmark Boardgame

In Israel, at least when I was a child, there’s a culture of board-games. We have, or had, an Israeli company called “Kodkod”, which released games, and I think some of them were originals.
I’ve definitely played strategy games as a kid, I’ve played Talisman many times, I’ve seen used copies of Risk at the library (missing parts, so never got to play it), etc.

So people in Israel don’t see board-games as weird, and in recent years the german style board-games had also begun arriving. Anyway, I’m going to talk on one of the best-known board games across the world, The Settlers of Catan.

I’ve played my first game of this in an Israeli RPG/TCG/etc convention many years ago. I won BTW, then lost the second game we’ve played with different people, and each game went totally different.
In one game, there were like a total of 3 cards bought across the board, and in the other a lot more were bought.

Anyway, in this game you play a bunch of nobles who have towns and build roads, trying to gain control of the small island they are on. Resources are had by dice coming with territory numbers you have a settlement bordering, and rolling a 7 on a 2d6 results in “The Thief” coming to visit.

I’ve never played the game with its supplements, which I know I should. We’ve owned the game for about two years but didn’t get to play it at home yet, which fills me with great shame. Must cook up some board-game knight, even if once a month.

I much prefer playing the game as an ultra diplomatic game. A game where you make pacts with people, where you backstab people, where people try to stop other people when they realize it’s too late, except it’s… too late. In such a game, victory is also about strategy, but more about playing your fellow-players; identifying what your goals are, how to get others to aid you, how you can help them gain their goals without helping them too much or disrupting yourself, etc.
I’ve also seen games of it which sadly went the other way. People asking who needs something but not caring for any alliances at all, not caring to play it as a social game, but each player doing their own thing, and the trades being as impersonal as a face-less bid system.

I consider Settlers of Catan my board-game benchmark. It is not “The Perfect Game” that I deduce points from deviation to, but I think it is a very good game, if rather basic, and serves as a good game to compare other games to to see what they do different, and this sometimes helps identify what I like or dislike about them, both for being similar and for being different.

Score:, 4/5 wood for sheep. It’s entirely possible that after playing with the Knights and Castles add-on, which most people consider mandatory, I could only think of playing the basic game as an abomination not worthy of more than 2.5/5. But I’m not there yet.