THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Well, I haven’t heard anything yet about when I should come in and move my stuff to my new desk. All I know is that I’m going to have to do that before my start date so I can get to work right away. When they’re ready to have me do that, I was told I would get a call. No call yet.

BOARD GAMES

After owning the game for about three years or so, Alesha and I finally got around to playing my Tales of the Arabian Nights board game. This is a storytelling adventure board game. It’s by far one of the most unique games I own. It’s a cross between a roleplaying game and a choose your own adventure with storytelling optional rules (one of 5 optional rules). Very odd but tons of fun.

When I read about the game on Boardgamegeek.com (BGG), I was very intrigued. I decided to get a copy but the only one I found was being sold on BGG by another user. I bought it from them and found, to my dismay, that it was all in German. Lucky for me, the person who sold me the copy help me get a translation for everything in the game. This was a good thing because this board game has a very important item that absolutely needs a translation, namely The Book of Tales. This book is the heart of the game.

During a turn, a player can move a number of spaces on a map of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and a bit of Africa, according to your wealth level. Once you finish your move (if you chose to move) you take a card from the encounter deck. If you flipped over a Fate card you can choose to keep it for later. If you flipped over an encounter, you have some sort of an adventure. Depending where on the map you are, what time of day it is, and what number you roll on a six sided die, the person on your left looks up what happens to you in The Book of Tales. Once they do, they tell you what or who you encounter. You then choose what you want to do, from a small unique group of decisions, based on what you just encountered. Once your choice is made and depending on what skills your character processes, the person on your left reads you a paragraph of what happens to you. The outcome can be good, bad, or sometimes, a bit pointless. Never the less, you have a small adventure. Each adventure you have changes your character in some way, either by giving you Story points, Destiny Points, a new skill, a change in your statues (for good or ill), a change in wealth (for good or ill) or even a treasure.

So what’s the point of the game? Well, that depends on what version of the game you are playing. At the beginning of the Standard and Storytelling version of the game you are asked to secretly distribute 20 points between Story points and Destiny points on a separate piece of paper, this is your secret goal called your Formula (for example if you put 12 points on Story points and 8 points on Destiny points that is your Formula). If during the game, as you travel around the board, you manage to meet your Formula (to continue from the example above…you happen to accumulate 12 Story points and 8 Destiny points) you can return to Baghdad (where all players started from) and win the game.

In The Adventure version of the game, the goal is different. If you manage to complete two quests and return to Baghdad first, you win the game. The adventure version of the game is a little more involved but just as much fun. During the Merchant version of the game, the object is to set up trade routes though out the map in order to gain great wealth. You win if your the first player to return to Baghdad with a treasure. If you’re playing the Solo adventure, you have to complete all the goals of all the other versions of the games (complete your formula, complete two quests, and obtain great wealth).

Out of all the ways to play the game, the Storytelling version is the most unique. This version of the game is different in that, instead of passing The Book of Tales to the person on your left, you keep the book, read what happens to you to yourself, and then you are given two minutes to tell the story in your own words to the people at the table. The more entertaining your version of the story, the more rewards you can get out of your adventure. If you recruit others at the table to help you tell the story by having them make sound effects for you or play a spontaneous supporting role, they might get rewards out of it as well.

I have not played this version of the game yet, but it really sounds like something that would be fun and silly to play. I can picture how much laugher there would be around the table if played with the right group of people.

All in all, we really enjoyed playing the game. Even though it was just the two of us. In fact, I was surprised my wife liked it so much. She like it so much that we played it two nights in a row because Alesha wanted to play it again. She beat me in the game we played the night before. It was a fun time. Alesha had an adventure in the Valley of Diamonds that had her laughing. The floor of the Valley of Diamonds is covered in diamonds but no one goes down there because giants snakes live down there. Alesha decided to risk going down there in a very unique way (but I won’t say what it was so I won’t spoil it for anyone who decides to play the game and investigate the Valley). To make a short story shorter, she didn’t quite succeed in her attempt and was lucky to escape with her life.

We had a blast playing this game. I highly recommend it. Up until now, there is no English version of this game, but that’s going to change soon. Z-man games is releasing an English language version. The version they’re releasing doesn’t seem to support the Merchant variant of the game, like my copy does, but hopefully they won’t change too much more. The new version will have 1000 new paragraphs that my version doesn’t have. In any case, the art looks amazing. It’s much better than the art in my copy (for a view of the new artwork click here). Depending, on how pretty the game is and depending if I happen to have a little extra cash on me, I might want to pick up a copy of the new version as well. Especially since my wife likest the game so much. As of the date of this writing, the game is suppose to come out late this year. You can already pre-order it from Thoughhammer.com.

ROLE PLAYING GAMES

This weekend, my wife invited her nephew and one of her best friends to stay over. I know that her best friend likes playing board games, and her nephew likes to come over, mostly because he wants to play my video games (he’s ten years old). I tried to play Dreamblade with him earlier in the day because I thought he’d get into the figures and the dice rolling, but the game fell flat because it was too complicated for him.

I wanted to play a game with him that he’d be into. The last time they were both over, we played Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery, and even though my wife, her best friend and I had fun, her nephew was bored. I don’t have any board games that would really appeal to a ten year old boy like him. If I had Heroscape it would be a different story, but I don’t. I needed a game that was Heroscape like. I also needed a game that would appeal to my wife and her friend because I wanted them to play as well. I knew that my wife’s best friend would have fun playing anything so after thinking it over and looking into the game closet I took out, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5.

A years or so ago, I picked up a Dungeons and Dragons Basic Game box. It looks like a board game box and it comes with miniatures, pre-generated character sheets, dice, an adventure, basic rules, and a bunch of boards that you can put together to make a dungeon. I brought that down, put it on the table and pretty much treated as if it was a board game. Of course, an hour before, I had to quickly read the adventure so I could take the players through it and I was familiar enough with the rules, that I thought I could play through it without really having to look many of them up.

Besides my wife, no one else knew what to expect from the game. I was not going to make it a heavy Role Play experience. All I was going to do is run a good old fashioned mindless “Hack and Slash dungeon crawl”. Having the minis and the boards helped a ton. The game played without any complications. It also helped that my wife was familiar with the game and she took it upon herself to lead by example, showing everyone all the endless choices that could be made in the game. All in all it was a hit with them. They were having a fantastic time playing the game. We played for four hours before my wife asked if we could stop because she was really tired and wanted to go to sleep. Everyone else at the table wanted to keep on going. They all thought that the game had stopped just as it was getting interesting. I was very surprised how much they liked it. In fact, the whole next day, they were constantly asking me when we would be able to play again. Unfortunately circumstances that day made it impossible to get back to it. Never the less, I got a new appreciation for the game.

Up until that day, I thought that if you were going to play D&D and just run a Hack and Slash Dungeon crawl, you might as well just play a video game that does that, like Diablo, Baldur’s Gate, or Champions of Norrath. Playing the game that night showed me that playing over a tabletop is much more fun. Yes, the fighting it s bit slower but because it’s not a scripted video game, you can choose to do much more creative things. This makes a huge difference, and makes the game much more fun than just playing a video game. Lesson learned.

Speaking of video games…

BOARD GAMES/VIDEO GAMES

Ticket to Ride came out on Xbox Arcade on the 24th of June. I’ve been reading the reviews, just to see what people say about it. Over all the game has gotten dissent reviews. Some player are even shocked at the way the game makes them feel. Like this quote from the Official Xbox magazine site:

Turns unfold steadily but relentlessly, and since you can perform only one action per turn, every moment is significant. We found ourselves at the edge of our seats with Ticket to Ride, hoping our rivals didn’t take certain stretches of track before we could. Yes, on the edge of our seats during a board game! In fact, we got so set on completing our Destination Tickets that the end of the game nearly always caught us by surprise.

Not all the reviews are like this. The IGN review is down right odd. For example this statement in the review:

It’s also a shame that there’s zero story built around the action. There’s no need for much, but something to tie it all together would have really helped this game gel.

Uh…someone should remind him he’s playing a board game not a roleplaying game or a first person shooter. How much story does UNO or RISK have?

Anyway, most everyone likes the game. The thing most reviewers are disappointed with is the visual presentation. They say it looks a bit dull. I agree, compared to the other modern board games on Xbox Arcade, Ticket to Ride doesn’t look as good. Still, it’s about the game play and as far as that goes, they all agree it’s a fun game.

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