Game Recommendations

Lots of people have recommended lots of games to the comments on my blog. I've tried out a bunch of them and I thought i would share my impressions:

iPhone

Drop7 has become my go-to app whenever I have a few minutes of downtime. It's an insidious combination of Tetris and Sudoku with a little bit of Minesweeper thrown in. The idea is to drop discs onto the board such that you blow up other discs and keep the screen clean. meanwhile new tiles march up from the bottom to make your life difficult. The luck of the draw can make some positions a little frustrating, but then again if it wasn't for the randomness the game wouldn't be nearly as fun. Yesterday it also hooked Del, and I lost the use of my phone for most of the afternoon. Anyway, I highly recommend it. Very skill-testing and very much a thinking game. There's a Lite version that will show you the basic gameplay, but if you like it I do think you'll want to pony up the couple of bucks for the full version as you get better formats plus really good high score tracking.

Reiner Knizia's Poison and Reiner Knizia's Knights of Charlemagne. Reiner Knizia is one of the most famous and prolific German board game designers. Of his games, I have personally enjoyed Ra, Medici, Amun Re, Tigris and Euphrates, and Lost Cities plus I see that he finally won the prestigious Spiel des Jahre last year for Keltis (which I have not played). Anyway, I love the idea of his games coming to iPhone, though I'm not sure I'm specifically in love with these two games.

Knights of Charlemagne is a well-executed port of a fairly light 1995 game where you play out cards and try to have the most points on enough tiles to win the game. It's reminiscent to me of Lost Cities and even more so of Pecking Order (a Richard Garfield design) where you and your opponent have the same basic resources and are just trying to use them more efficiently. I find these games a little too calculational for my tastes (I enjoy strategy more than tactics), but even if I'm not going to keep playing it for hours and hours I have no regrets about spending a couple of bucks on a game app that I'll play 10-20 times and then put away. The app includes an AI that you play against in a 2-player game and also a hot-seat mode, which I doubt gets much use since if you and your friend were together then why would you choose to play an iPhone game? The tabletop version is alleged on Board Game Geek to be best with 3-players, but I bet that would be pretty hard to program a good interface for.

Poison is another port of a fairly light, fairly math-y tabletop game. This time you're trying not to capture points but if your card sends the cauldron over 13 then you have to take all the cards in the cauldron. The app is well done and I think I like it better than Knights of Charlemagne. If I hadn't found Drop7, I would probably still be playing this regularly as I don't feel like I understand the strategies very well yet and the AI is still beating me consistently.

Flight Control seems very good for someone other than me. The idea is that you're an air traffic controller and you have to draw flight paths for incoming aircraft such that they all land without crashing into each other. It's fun and I can see how it would hook people, but for me I quickly grow tired of realizing that my fingers aren't as fast or as accurate as my brain wants them to be.

Funny ... I was going to try out a few more recommendations as I wrote this, but Del has once again appropriated my phone to play Drop7. My queue has Totomi and iScopa at the top, for whatever that's worth. Meanwhile, here's a useful link with some other iPhone game recommendations, most of which i haven't gotten around to yet.

Finally, a plug: My friends Alan Comer and Nate Heiss put a breakout variant together called Fireball, Block Destroyer that just arrived at the app store. It's worth checking out if you get anything resembling enjoyment from breakout games. Alan just accepted a job at Mind Control Games so I suspect his days of messing around with iPhone app's are numbered, but I know they had fun while it lasted.

Board Games

Multiple people have recommend Le Havre, which is the next game done by the designer of Agricola (Uwe Rosenberg). I haven't tracked down a copy yet, but I think I'll try to do that this afternoon so I can take it to Wizards for Tuesday night board games. Most of my board gaming this past month has been Through The Ages, which I continue to enjoy. I now think it plays best with 3 players, by the way. 4 has some additionally interesting dynamics, but I don't think they're worth extending the game length from 4.5 hours to 6.

XBox 360

I haven't played much XBox at all, lately. I suspect that the next game I dive into will be Duels of the Planeswalkers, aka Magic for XBLA. It cleared the Microsoft certification process last week so it shouldn't be too much longer now. I have seen enough of it to know that it's well polished, though I admit I haven't played enough to know how challenging it will be for long-time Magic players.

PC/Web games

Most of my gaming on this platform has been done on Magic Online. I've got 16 QP's and counting, so I'm qualified for the monthly championship and if i rack up 9 more points then I get a first round bye. If anybody has any Alara block constructed tech that they want to share the week before Pro Tour Honolulu, feel free to drop me a line.

I did also try Within a Deep Forest, a free game by Nifflas. It's a platformer with a really good physics engine where you play a bouncing ball. Well above average for a free web game, but at the end of the day too much of a dexterity game to hold my attention for long. If you like platformers with some additional thinking required, though, it's well worth checking out.

Has anybody tried out PopCap's new Plants Versus Zombies game yet? Peggle was awesome and despite the casual-looking skin I feel no shame in having played the hell out of it. It was quite deep and superbly well executed (the Ode to Joy as the Extreme Fever theme music in particular really shows you what you can do with sound to enhance gameplay). Having enjoyed Peggle as a sort of thinking game in disguise, I'm very curious to see PopCap's take on the tower defense genre. They seem to have an almost Blizzard-like willingness to make sure they get the gameplay right. Anyway, would love to hear from folks who've played it.

That's the rundown for me. What else is out there that we thinking gamers should be playing, if only we knew about it?
 

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