AGI - Dominion

Dominion, from Rio Grande Games, is a game about building a kingdom. Your start out small using your resources to build a bigger kingdom. This in turns allows you to buy more Estates, duchies, and provinces for yourself. Amazingly, this is all done with cards... Many, many, many, cards. (500 cards in total.) There are four Types of cards:

• Treasure Cards: The money cards to buy things, Ranging from 1 to 3 coins.
• Victory Cards: Give you victory points to win the game, again ranging form 1 (estates) to 3 (Provinces).
  
• Kingdom Cards: Cards that help your kingdom get money and victory points faster.
• Curse Cards: Subtract Victory points.

The game "board" are the stacks of cards. The Treasure and Victory cards and 10 of  25 Kingdom cards chosen randomly. The player's turn has 3 parts Action, Buying and End. Action cards are played first these are Kingdom cards, and allow the player to do things like: "add 2 more gold to you pile this turn" or "play another action card". Buying is when you can buy new cards to add to your deck, finally the End phase is when you discard any cards you played this turn to your discard pile and draw 5 new cards. This continues until the one of the of the Victory card piles or 3 of the Kingdom card piles is empty. Victory points are then added up to see who the winner is.  

The game is quick to pick up, most understand the basics of a turn after 1 round of play. The real gaming is the strategy on how you create your kingdom. One method is of course to collect Victory cards, another method is to use the garden card to gain a small amount of victory points, over the course of the entire game. The smoothness of the mechanics make the gameplay go by quickly.

By the time this review has gone up there have been many expansions for the game. Each one adds more cards into the mix and more ways to win. While Dominion is not the most complex game is still a gamers game. Those who don't play things beyond Monopoly may be overwhelmed by the options of the cards. Dominion may be still worth trying with the family if there is time to play it, but be prepared to explain many of the cards.

AGI - Fluxx

Welcome to Analog Game Interest round 2!

Today, dear reader(s) (I might have 2 people reading this) we have a game that is not only fun but unpredictable. Fluxx is not a game that can be explained well because humans by nature need games to have set rules. In this game, the rules always change. watch as I try to explain below:

Fluxx is a card game by Loony Labs, that for a lack of a better way to define it, it is a game about rules. Rules most likely will change after each players turn. One thing they do to keep it simple is that you can only draw/play cards on your turn.

There are 4 types of cards: (as seen in picture above) Rules, Goals, Keepers, and Actions.

Rule cards: Cause the rules to change in the game. If a card is played that requires everyone to draw 2 cards on your turn that means you draw 2 cards.

Goals: these cards allow give you your victory conditions. buy for filling the specified goal you can win the game. there is only one goal at a time.

Keepers: these are used to help you achieve goals. by placing these down in fron t of you during your turn you can work towards the current goal.

Action: these are the spice cards that allow you to do things outside the normal rules. for example: one cards says draw 3 cards, play 2 of them and discard the 3rd one.


The challenge for anyone new is to wrap their head around playing the game. It seems really complex but in all honesty after a few rounds of play most people catch on. It is amusing to see people reaction to the game. Most approach it as way too complex and leave loving the game. the games length can vary sometimes it can end after about 5 minutes of playing other times I've seen games go as long as 30 minutes. It also forces one to never plan ahead because goals, rules, and keepers shift all the time. To quote one person: "This game made me fear change." Fluxx's gameplay certainly lives up to its name.

The downside is that this unpredictable gameplay results in only one way to win:
By getting everything you need to work on your turn. I'd say 99% of games are won by the player having the cards he needs and putting them all down on his turn. Its rare that a person wins through some else's actions. However, the feeling of success by doing what you need to win on a single turn is a great rush.

This game is great to play anyone who needs a good party game for a lot of people. If you don't have it, buy it.

The Latest Fad?

Just about everyone has either heard of or played Portal. Valve has once again created something unique in a genre that tends to run stale at times. I bought the Orange Box mostly for Team Fortress 2, But now the real star of the Orange Box is Portal. In this short game, I did something I hadn't done in a long time playing a FPS:

Lose track of time.

I literally was planning on only playing a few stages then jump into so TF2 action. Three hours and some minutes later there I was done with the game. Yes, it was that good. If you haven't played it yet please do, you'll be pleasantly surprised...If you haven't been reading video game blogs then well you probably know whats gonna happen, but take it from someone who had the ending spoiled for them when I say it was still worth playing.

Anyways, the real reason for this post is about Portal but not to just say how awesome it is. It made think about great games. Portal is a great game people will probably be quoting it for generations in the game industry. However, three months from now, will this all just be a passing fad? Portal is a wonderful game but will people really remember the companion cube? The reason I say this is because Portal is Orange Box's Dark Horse, it wasn't heavily advertised like TF2 or Halo 3. It was just there and it shined. Sure I remember hearing a little about it here and there but TF2 and especially Halo 3 have been sent out as the thing to get. Halo 3 pretty much was being advertised as the greatest game of all time. For a good week after its release Halo 3 was dominating Kotaku's posts with everything from action figures to fan videos. When you compare that to Kotaku's posts about Portal, Halo still dominates it. My fear was that the game that has wonderful design will just fade. Just a another fad in the game industry.

But there are 2 main reasons Portal may survive the short attention span the industry has:

1) Valve is smart. Whether its a mod community or multiplayer, it will help keep it alive. The Mod community keep a game alive well past its prime. I still remember reading PC Gamer top 100 games for 3 years in a row after Half-Life came out. Each year Half-Life was number one, It blew my mind simply because no game ever lasted a year. The reason they kept giving it the award was the Mod community. New mods like Counterstrike and Day of Defeat were popping up all the time.

2) The other advantage is that since there was no hype machine, there will be less hesitance to place it as a "great game of all time". Hype and advertising sell your game to make money but at the cost of people avoiding just because of all the hype. Portal's hype is more word of mouth and less corporate advertising. I don't know about anyone else but I'll take a friends word that game is good over a two page advertisement in a magazine.

Portal may not be a 30 hour epic or a "cultural revolution" but it will be a game I look at when I want to see how to make a great game.