I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical when I first saw this game online. The advertisement went on to describe how players would be picking various races throughout the game in an attempt to get the most points in the end. Territories that you conquered could be wiped out by another player who decided to start with a new race and a fresh hefty stack of army tokens…it seemed a bit too chaotic for my blood. Then, out of the blue, one of my friends recommended this game to me seeing as how I was covering a ton of board games on my blog. This good friend of mine, let’s call him “Booyah!” (his name was changed to protect the innocent), said that the game was a lot of fun once you get used to the racial abilities. “Booyah!” has never steered me wrong before…so I took a chance and bought the game. I’m glad I did.
My, my, how times have changed. I remember when Stratego used to be about Generals, Bombs, Admirals, Miners, and various other soldiers of military rank. I was surprised by how many variants that have been developed ever since I last played it back in the 80′s. There’s a Star Wars variant, a Narnia variant…even a Pirates of the Caribbean variant. *Shrug* If something is that successful…why not? Anyway, I wanted to briefly touch on this classic board game, using a variant recently released by Hasbro. I honestly didn’t know it was a variant when I bought it…all I knew is that my original was somewhere in a house long forgotten and that I wanted to expose my son to the game. I was in my local Wal-Mart and happened to come across a box with the word “Stratego” on it in the board game isle…I didn’t bother looking any harder. Boy was I surprised by what I found when I unboxed the game at home.
How many of you as kids used to play with those plastic army men soldiers? You know, those green and tan figures that were poised in various positions? If you were lucky, your package might have come with a barricade or a plastic tank. I distinctly remember setting them up in my backyard, specifically my sandbox, and narcissistically making them sink one by one as they did battle…this was in between chess games and Hi-C Ecto Cooler fruit drinks mind you. Anyway, seeing this particular game advertised on Steam brought back a flood of memories.
Have you ever played Civilization, be it the video game or the board game? If you have, then you’d be familiar with the concept of a ”tech tree.” If you haven’t played any sort of game where you’re leveling up your civilization, then imagine a giant tree and at the bottom of said tree are the technologies that start your civilization off…things like “writing” and “the wheel.” As you go up the tree, you advance in technology, unlocking things like “bronze working” and eventually things like “rocketry.” The tree branches out into different areas of tech, covering different aspects of a civilization like the military and economy.
I have to admit, being a policeman or a fireman was always appealing to me as a kid. It didn’t help that I was the smallest kid in the universe, but I still found the idea of making a difference to be quite appealing. People who risk their lives every day are to be commended for their dedication and service to their fellow-man. It turns out that I was better at calculating “X” than I was doing push ups in gym class…hence why I took up accounting as opposed to something more physically demanding. To that end, I found great pleasure in discovering and purchasing this little gem and unpackaging the components in front of the kids. My eleven year old son looked at the box excitedly and asked, “Do you get to save people in this?” to which I replied proudly, “Yep.”
Whenever I see this game on my shelf, I get a disturbing visual of Quark’s big head from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I then picture him playing Tongo with a bunch of other Ferengi…a game that deals with buying, selling, acquiring, and other things you’d normally see on the Wall Street floor. Don’t ask me why…I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning. Continue Reading
Okay, let’s get the jokes out of the way now. No, this isn’t a game where the first person to get caked with urine loses. No, this isn’t a contest to see who has the longest stream and yes, crossing them would mean that all life as you knew it would stop instantaneously and every molecule in your body would explode at the speed of light…a total protonic reversal. I’ll wait while you Google that…
We’re moving on from Pandemic to look at something a little more simple, but still a lot of fun. Castle Panic is a tower defense kind of game with a cooperative theme. Players take turns playing cards trying to slay monsters that are advancing on their castle. Let’s take a closer look at the how the game is played.
Saving the world, it turns out, is pretty frickin difficult…at least it is in the board game I’m about to review. I’ve hyped about it in other articles and am finally getting around to writing about it. Let’s take a quick look and see what Pandemic is all about.
It’s only fitting that I follow up my last article, “Real Parenting: The Power Of Knowledge“, with a review on the latest board game I’ve had the pleasure of playing with the youngest members of the family. It’s quite possibly one of the most educational board games in my collection which makes me excited to play it…especially with my eleven year old son who, at one point, had to take speech classes. It’s a board game that forces players to not only come up with words that fit a category, but makes them spell it correctly too.
What should a person do when they discover that they have a flat tire? How does one buy a house? What should a manager look for in a job applicant? What formula in Excel allows you to remove a set number of characters from a bunch of cells at once? What is the difference between an eighth note and a sixteenth note? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?
So, you’ve reached level 74 and you are not sure where to go next. At this point, your gear can probably get you through some of the insane maps but nothing is dropping to help you tackle the nightmare maps. After some painstaking research and a little trial and error, I’ve managed to collect and lock mythical gear for my future toons to use. Mythical gear is the next step in tier once you reach level 74. What maps and what classes did I use to get the mythical gear, you ask? Keep reading.
Quick question…what’s the first dungeon crawler you remember playing? If anyone said the Diablo III beta…you may want to pay attention to the teacher instead of reading my blog. *Sigh* Youngins. Anyway, mine was Eye of the Beholder, released back in 1991 in the MS-DOS days. Some dungeon crawlers date back even further than that. It’s been over twenty years since I’ve played anything like those old school games…then Legend of Grimrock came along.
I was thrilled when this one came in the mail early…I just couldn’t say no to a cooperative Star Trek board game. With all of the board game reviews I’ve been doing lately, I’m starting to think that I might have a problem. Nahhh…
Chuck E. Cheese’s has been around for quite some time. My first memory of the place was me getting sick on their pizza during my birthday party. It could very have well been the five life-size puppets that they had on this fake stage that activated every so often to perform a show. I don’t remember much, but I know now that it was probably the bastard spawn of something Stephen King and M. Night Shyamalan had created.
It was roughly 8 PM when I decided to go upstairs and switch over to my pajamas when I looked in on my eleven year old son while I was passing by his room. He was by himself with a mess of Pokémon cards around him…and I mean a real mess. It looked like someone had converted eighty rainbows into one large alcoholic beverage, chugged it in five seconds flat, and ejected it along with whatever food they had consumed over the past three months onto the floor.