Chatter Of The Squirrel

Boardgame: Agricola

Not a reference to the Roman general.

Agricola is also latin for farmer.

It’s also a VERY hot new boardgame published by Z-Man games. It’s topping the charts for best boardgame, and the English translation was eagerly anticipated. That first run is already sold out. The second run will release this week.

I managed to play a game of Agricola last week. Someone was keen enough to fork over RM340 to purchase the thing from eBay, and lent the box to Mage Cafe. Jefri & I showed up JUST to play Agricola. Triona dropped by too. So, that’s 3 of us newbies, Rob tutoring us, and Wong kicking our asses.

I’m impressed by how easy anyone can pick up the game. I think learning it will only take slightly longer than Settler’s of Catan. It’s easier on the newbie than Puerto Rico, where the new player almost always inadvertantly become the king-maker where his random decisions let the player next to him win. It has more variability and much better replay value. And challenging enough even for a power-gamer. It’s got a friendly theme (being a farmer), that will easily draw players new to boardgames. Instead of themes with galactic conquest or dungeon crawl that screams “Power GEEK!”

In fact, it’s a boardgame that I’m seriously contemplating buying. For the first time since I bought MAD the Boardgame 20yrs ago.

You start the game with a farmer, his wife, a shack with 2 rooms, and 13 empty fields. The game is played in 14 turns, during which you have to build more rooms to expand your family, build fences to create pastures to keep sheep, boars or cattle, plow the land and plant grain or vegetables, upgrade your house, build a fireplace so you can cook your animals etc.

Every few turns, you make sure your farm is producing enough to feed your family. Every turn, new actions are made available. Each action can only be taken once per turn, so you’ll be competing for the actions you want with other players. And the more family members you’ve got, the more actions you can take, but also the more mouths you have to feed. In the full game, you’ll also draw from a deck of Occupation and Minor Improvements cards, which will give each player randomised advantages to help make every game different.

But I was only able to try out the basic tutorial game with my friends. A squatter was dropping by my house that night, so I had to take off to pick him up.

And I can’t go back to Mage Cafe to play the game cos some guy has already bought up that one and only set. I’ll have to wait for the second run, and Wolf to bring in a shipment direct from ZMan. Sadly, the second run won’t have Animeeples… Only little white / black / brown cubes to represent sheep / boar /cattle.

Game: Diablo III

The picture says everything.

Post-apocalyptic Sci-fi PC Adventure

But these words together, and most people will immediately think of one word. Well, those of you who are within that narrow demography who played PC games during the 90’s anyway…

You won’t believe what I’ve played lately…

Hauntingly familiar??

And a most familiar, and unusual, character generation screen…

This is FALLOUT 3!!

Apparently, if you create a female character, she starts the game completely naked.

This is the technology demo of the still-born Fallout 3… And it can be downloaded here.

The Fallout series were some of the best games I played from yester-years…

Someone else bought over the rights to the game, and will be launching a new game in Fall of this year.

Will be giving it a good once over when it releases…

Gary Gygax is dead

Dungeons And Dragons.

TSR.

Enough said.

The Portal Song

This song is just so… erm… difficult to define?

A little funny. A little poetic. Very geek. The voice is sweetly haunting. It’s like… Lex Luthor with the voice of Charlotte Church. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s a piece of creative genius… I’m listening to it over and over and over…

The Flash animation is a parody of Portal, a PC game where you match wits with an AI to ultimately destroy the Computer. And this is the Computer’s song.

There’s also a Flash version of the Portal game, like here. It’s a very well done game. And I’m stuck.