Category Archives: Gaming

Gaming

Path of Exile

As I mentioned in my 2015 retrospective, I’ve been playing Path of Exile again. It has been a while since I’ve played, and it is really interesting to see all the things that they have added to the game since then, including a complete fourth act.

As Path of exile adds new features, it’s definitely creeping up the list of my favorite rogue-likes. One feature that they added was skill jewels. These are bundles of passive skills that are socketed into the skill web. The novelty here, I think, is the image in my mind of someone in a designers meeting saying, “Why not allow the players to customize parts of their passive tree?” Just like the passive web itself, this is really quite the novel concept, and the fact that they pulled it off (without stretching the bounds of their universe overmuch), is pretty impressive. Continue reading Path of Exile →

Gaming

Getting Back into Guild Wars 2

Lately, Jessa and I have been playing a lot of Guild Wars 2. The thing that really brought me back to Guild Wars 2 is the removal of my primary complaint about it at the start: the level grind. In particular, there are a couple of new features that made this less of a problem for me.

The reason the leveling annoys me so much in Guild Wars 2 is basically two-fold. First, Guild Wars 2 is a mostly-open world MMO, meaning that you can pretty much go to anywhere on the map immediately after the tutorial. The catch is that a lot of this grand map will be indirectly locked off if you’re not high enough level to deal with the mobs located there. The reason this one in particular sticks in my craw is that they’ve made levels irrelevant up to your level by downleveling you when you are in a zone that is below your level – so if they can downlevel you, why won’t they uplevel you, or, better yet, remove levels altogether? Continue reading Getting Back into Guild Wars 2 →

Gaming

T.I.M.E. Stories

For our weekly game day last week, my wife and I decided to give T.I.M.E. Stories a shot. This is another game that I got for Christmas, this one from my mother-in-law, Sally. I saw this for the first time when I was in The Jester’s Court in Grand Junction for Thanksgiving. It’s a cooperative “decksploration” game based around the idea of time and dimensional travel – for me, this is an obvious hook!

The nature of T.I.M.E. Stories’s gameplay makes people very nervous about spoilers (which I’ll address why in a bit), so I want to be upfront that I’ll be keeping this review out of spoiler territory and I’ll be discussing mostly mechanics, though I will dip into broad strokes about how the stories appear to be structured. Continue reading T.I.M.E. Stories →

Gaming

Resistor

Of the Christmas gifts that I got this year, I only got the chance to play one of them during my post-Christmas Game Day – Resistor. I got this one from my wife, and it’s a small game that I very nearly backed this fall when I saw it come across kickstarter. My main hesitation was that it was a two-player head-to-head game, and sometimes these are a little difficult for me to get my wife to play (which is my most common second for playing a game). Conversely, during the game day, there were a number of 2-on-2 games going, so Resistor actually got a fair amount of table time.

I was quite impressed with Resistor as a product. First, the quality of components was solid. I may not be a fan of the size of the cards, but they did get the job done. The theme is also suitably 80s and the artworks really brings it home (I doubly love the mock tractor-feed rules printout). Continue reading Resistor →

Gaming

Metagaming in Role-Playing Games

The guys over at Gamerstable recently did an episode on Metagaming. To give a bit of an introduction, my definition of metagaming is: Using player knowledge to guide character action. For example, as a player, I know the enemy that my character is fighting is a werewolf (even though my character has never seen or heard of one) and I know that werewolves are weak to silver (even though my character doesn’t know this), and so my character attacks his enemy with a silver weapon. This is metagaming, and, in particular, it’s using player knowledge to gain an advantage that a character wouldn’t have.

The gamerstable crew was pretty critical of metagaming, and, I’ll admit, there are lots of ways that metagaming can be bad for a role-playing game. However, in my experience as a GM, I have found that metagaming can be a much more positive force on the game, so I want to talk about it a bit more here. Continue reading Metagaming in Role-Playing Games →

Gaming

The Big Game

Every year, those of us in the family who play Warhammer 40k get together at my Uncle’s Upholstery Shop in Austin, Colorado and play the big game.  The goal is two-fold: to get together and spend some family time together, and to pull out all the stops and play Warhammer 40k, all day, with as many models as we want.  In previous editions, this was called Apocalypse, for us, it’s the Thanksgiving Apocalypse. Continue reading The Big Game →

Gaming

Warhammer 40k is Basically Football, Part 3

The Game

Warhammer 40k and Football share the most similarity in their execution of the game. I think this is likely due to the fact that they are both attempting to simulate certain aspects of war itself. One similarity is that they both capture the tactical aspect – making a series of short-scoped decisions that get your closer to your goal while keeping your opponent away from theirs. Continue reading Warhammer 40k is Basically Football, Part 3 →

Gaming

Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 2

The Community

Just as football is built on its community, so too is Warhammer 40k. In both cases, fans of both games spend at least as much time talking about the game as they do watching or playing it. The reason for this is that they both contain aspects that make great conversation: shared context, lore, and drama.

Shared Context

Shared context is what gives any two football fans in the U.S. the ability to talk about football with each other. There is a shared jargon, knowledge of how the game works, and familiarity with various teams. Each of these things allows a much simpler communication between fans and makes for better storytelling; if you’ve ever seen a football fan try to explain an awe-inspiring moment in a game to someone who doesn’t know the teams or the rules, you know what I mean. The same is true of Warhammer – a story about a unit failing their morale check on a critical turn is just as exciting to someone who plays Warhammer 40k as an interception in the last quarter of a football game is to someone who watches football. Continue reading Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 2 →

Gaming

Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 1

Quite often, I end up explaining my hobbies to my friends and coworkers (though not often to my family, since they’re a lot of who I play with). Warhammer 40k and other miniature wargames I think are the hardest to explain since the hobby is so broad. It’s not just playing a game with miniature figures (which is actually a fraction of the time I spend with the hobby), so I’ve often tried to explain it more holistically. Ian and I hit on an explanation recently that I found entertaining – Warhammer 40k is basically football.

The Team

In football, you have your home team, or, more precisely, the team that you like to rout for. There are lots of things to distinguish a team: what city they herald from, their team colors, the temperament and fame of certain players or managers, their wins and losses each season, and their rivals. In Warhammer 40k, there are just as many things that may make up an army. For instance, an army us usually chosen from a faction, which can be loosely correlated to where the army heralds from, and describes what kind of alien they are. It sometimes, but not always, also comes with recommendations for what the team colors are. Continue reading Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 1 →