Star Realms continues to be my go-to game when there are five minutes to kill, and over the course of the week, I got better and better, seemingly overcoming my slump. Still, it's only getting better against a medium strength A.I., so it's not where I want to be playing really. I'm still not sold on buying the digital version of what's sat behind me. Hopefully, there'll be a deal or something when the next big lot of physical cards get shipped out in a few months.
The Witcher 3 still looks pretty, but all I was doing was hoovering up treasure in the form of Witcher gear diagrams. If you really want to be critical of the series, it's an awful lot of fetch quests, but they're well written and set in wonderful environments, so it get's a pass.
I dabbled in Superhot again, now I've got the endless mode unlocked. 49 kills, not too shabby. Wasn't the neatest of rounds, with lots of silly decisions made but I managed the situation for a while - until the red dudes really started rushing in.
In two lengthy sessions, we appear to have come to an end of a Pathfinder campaign, but perhaps not the end, I'm not too sure. The fight that dragged on through the night did appear to involve the big bad evil guy (albeit in the form of a small, possibly radioactive child), but he's still alive and kicking, and some of the players get the impression that there's more to come, that there has to be, because it's a bit of a let down if this is the end of the super dungeon. We shall see how it goes next week, I suppose.
And now, continue reading for the new games.
As I mentioned last time, board and card games are a big part of my gaming time, and after posting last week I went off to play a few of them, including Secret Hitler, a social deduction, hidden role game where you are randomly assigned teams and must reach your victory condition without knowing anything about your fellow players.
If you're up as the President for the round, you elect a Chancellor, everyone votes on whether the pair of you are good to vote, and if yes, you draw three cards which will have either Liberal or Fascist faces, and you give two of them to your Chancellor, and they put one of them into action - Liberals to beat Hitler, Fascists to help him, obviously.
You can force Chancellors to vote how you want them to vote, by giving them two identical cards, or, through the luck of the draw, you can be faced with three cards you don't want and have no choice but to play. At that point, everyone should be arguing and bluffing and moaning about what just happened, and the round advances to the next President to see how they fare.
The genre is not my favourite, and I don't know where Secret Hitler ranks within it. A lot of these games involve everyone playing by the rules because they just don't know how to exploit them in order to win. It was my first game of Secret Hitler specifically, but not my first social deduction title. I knew what could be done, and how people could be coerced into doing something they didn't want to do, but it just didn't seem to come about. It felt like we were just going through the motions until the game ended.
Other titles played in that session included The Game, where players have to work together to shed an entire deck of numbered cards, in somewhat of an order, without telling each other which numbers they've got. The Game is best described as 'Someone on this table will lose the Game for everyone else. Don't let it be you.'
Dixit is a game of being specific to someone, yet vague to everyone else, as you choose a card from your hand of bizarre artworks, say something to describe it - a word, sentence, song lyric, book title, whatever you can think of - shuffle it amongst contributions from the other players, who are trying to steal points off you by playing a card that better matches that description, then everyone votes on which card was yours. Correct answers score points, votes for your picture scores points even if it wasn't the round leaders' image, but if everyone or nobody guessed your card correctly, then you were either too specific or too vague and don't score points while everyone else does.
I pulled into a strong lead, for once, but was pipped at the post by a well-played father-son reference. The father gave the clue, the son got the image, they both scored vital points while I was confused by another image entirely. That's Dixit.
It was a day for team games as Codenames made an appearance, in both word and picture formats. Two spymasters know which of 25 words relate to their team and must give one-word clues to their spies that will help reveal them. Those clues must, at the same time, be good enough to avoid revealing the other teams' words, or being an innocent civilian (which, if chosen, ends the round) or the Assassin (which would end the game in a loss for whichever team chose it). It's a very simple game to get into, but it ultimately results in a table full of people staring at words in silence, not confident enough in making a decisions until some kind of democratic process has taken place where they vote for the first word they're going to go for, knowing that one mistake is all it takes to end their turn.
Finally, a round or two of Doctor Who Fluxx, which shouldn't ever be played with more players than the box says. It just won't be fun. Back to the video games.
I got an email from somewhere about Ortus Regni, or specifically an Ortus Regni playmat. I don't know why I got such an email, but it did say that the game is free to play on Steam, and given that it's a card game, there's very little for me to say no to.
Oh boy. Maybe I should have said no. This is a card game about Fiefs and Princes and Politics and Jousting and Vikings, and it's all done through pictures, not pictures and text, like every other card game. You need to understand the rules before playing, and the rules are thick with medieval... stuff. Just look at this tutorial. Titlers, Vassals, Prince Lord... there's only one game worth playing with all these words, and it isn't Ortus Regni.
I think I immediately regret saying that. Crusader Kings II is deep, and you're going to need a diploma in order to get into it, no matter how many YouTubers there are saying 'no, don't worry, it's not as hard as it looks'. Bollocks. It's harder.
Tooltips list a hundred stats, people with unpronounceable names do things that directly relate to you, somehow, if you only understood what some other word meant. Lineages and dynasties and lord knows what else form the spine of this historical simulator, and I always fail to do anything of note in it.
You can choose anyone on the map and become them, going down whatever paths take your fancy through their lives. The problem I have is that when nothing appears to be happening, I want to make something happen, and when I make something happen it is, without fail, a colossal disaster, resulting in lost wars and negative piety. Probably.
I would like to look into mods and alternate maps for this, but the entry level is formidable, even with help. It's a tough sell. Glad I bought it cheap to see it first hand, and it hasn't completely put me off playing, but yeah. A tricky situation to be in - a game you want to play but can't get into properly.
I briefly played some Super Hexagon too. Somehow, a long time ago, I reached 60 seconds on the first stage of the game, rotating around shapes and avoiding onrushing walls, but this time it was more in the range of 16 seconds until a game over. 48 seconds was my best, and the music is still in my head.
There was another onrushing wall game played this week, in the form of the Onrush beta test. This is a game where Motorstorm and Burnout had an offspring, and that child was interested in team-based shooters. It's weird, but I think there's something in this.
It is very reminiscent of that Motorstorm reveal trailer, waaaay back in the early days of the PlayStation 3 - as though we've finally realised that game in 2018. Two teams of drivers and riders race towards a common goal, such as boosting as often as possible (hitting jumps, smashing A.I. drivers into bits, near misses and so on), or driving through checkpoints to increase a collective team timer, the first team to run out of time losing.
Cars have different handling, tricks, some kind of fancy weapon or ability or something... Selecting the right car for the mode could well mean the difference between winning and losing, but then again, doing things as a team is important too. You can drive alone and be a target for the opposition to wreck you, knocking you out of the game - and therefore not scoring points - until you respawn, or you can drive in a pack, safety in numbers style, consistently getting points.
It's definitely one to look out for, because it is quite the looker. The beta goes through only two race modes, but the tracks change from sunny to snowing over the course of a single race, so it's a pretty looking tech demo as well.
And that's about that for this week. Once again, a board game session beckons. I might be putting on a co-op firework display, I might be redesigning a poverty strichen London, I might even be killing off sci-fi characters in the most miserable way possible. Who knows?
Games are bloody everywhere, aren't they? Just can't keep up.