Never give up, never trade all your resources!

Or something like that!

This time we’re going to look at a new game I picked up at a recent convention I attended, RoundCon.

I’ve had the Settlers from Catan for years and love the little game.  It’s fast, simple, and a blast to play.  I’ve had my eye on one of it’s successors for a while now, Starfarers from Catan!

In Starfarers the play is very similar to the original Catan with a few interesting changes.  First the basics:  You roll dice to see what generates resources each turn based on numbers on chips on each of the resource generating locations.  You use these resources to build things.  In the original Catan you built cities and roads.  In Starfarers you build expansions to your ships, colonies, spaceports, and trading posts.  The general idea is the same: you want to be the first to garner fifteen victory points in order to win the game.  In Settlers victory points were counted from cities and towns as well as some ‘prize-like’ victory points for having the largest standing army (special cards you could buy) or the longest contiguous road.  Starfarers counts colonies and space ports but also introduces some extra competition in the form of the trading system with the alien races further away from the starting planets.  The player with the most trading posts around a particular trader gets that race’s friendship token.  These tokens are worth two victory points each!  Also you can, using the wonderful event system in the game, gain fame rings on your ship to indicate heroic deeds accomplished.  Every two fame rings grants another victory point.  You gain and lose favor with the traders and gain and lose fame rings leading to an enjoyable dynamic experience.

As a two player game it was fun but by adding more it can only get better.  As just two players the universe became divided rather quickly and after I took three of the four traders through a bit of luck and speed the game was concluded.  With more players the struggle to maintain control of the traders would be more heated and the game would last longer.  Still, that’s just taking a great cake and adding icing.  And who doesn’t like icing?  Someday I might pick up the expansion that adds two more max players (right now it caps at four players) but I hardly ever get a large gaming group together these days with my time constraints.  Those acquainted with my other site, Falling Leaves, are already aware of the little leisure time I can afford between work and school so I won’t dwell on it here.

The summary here is that the game, Starfarers of Catan is well made and dynamic enough for repeated playing.  While the four player base set maximum is somewhat constraining it does not hold back on any of the spacey fun the game presents.  Live long and build ship expansions.

Paizo’s ‘New Era’ is closer to a new ending .. And a poll!

As you probably already know, Paizo Publishing is scrapping both Dungeon and Dragon magazines. In their stead Paizo is starting a new magazine of their own concoction, ‘Pathfinder’.

Pathfinder promises to be a magazine touted towards campaigns under the Open Gaming License. While the information in their release is brief; at first glance the publication appears to be a rehashing of Dungeon, most specifically the scenarios, only using a more generic rules set than one of the big DnD ones. However, digging deeper into the dark bowels of their FAQ, it seems that the truth is far worse.

The magazine with be primarily only pieces of an adventure spread out over multiple issues. The first episode of this style will last the first six issues. Now, Dungeon had these in it, too, but it also held far more info and articles. There will be some of this in Pathfinder as well, but that’s not the focus of the magazine. It’s adventure telling, not assisting.

Each issue apparently will run right around fourteen dollars to purchase from the store and most likely a reduced cost to subscribers. So, it’s also more expensive than Dragon. So, by crunching some numbers together, the first campaign will run six issues at fourteen dollars each, so for one complete mini campaign your out of pocket cost from the store will be roughly eighty five dollars. Yes. EIGHTY FIVE. How much do you care for buying the whole core set of three-five DnD books again for the sole purpose of one measly adventure? Those pregenerated campaign books for sale run what, thirty dollars maximum? So you go out to purchase Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and return with Ptolus and all it’s ostentatiously overpriced glory. Ridiculous.

I might pick up the first issue simply to take a more informed stance on the issue; see how it’s laid out, content, how much it weighs my wallet down, etc. I hardly expect to be floored by anything other than Paizo’s vanity. I sincerely believe that the reason Dragon and Dungeon’s licenses have been pulled back by WotC was to rip them back from the gangrenous claws of Paizo’s terror squad.

So the poll:

Will you be making a purchase of Paizo’s new magazine, Pathfinder?

* Sure, how bad could it be?
* Yes, I buy all sorts of these magazines.
* Maybe.
* No, I hate those guys.
* No, I will boycott them for what they have done.

Spawn Boss Must Die ..

I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without letting everyone in on a fun little game someone at work discovered:

Desktop Tower Defense!

The premise is simple: it’s somewhat based on the defense maps from Starcraft and Warcraft.  You build multiple towers of various kinds and upgrade them with the gold you get from killing creeps (what the coder calls the enemies).  As you progress the creeps get increasingly bigger hitpoint pools and more types begin to appear.

First off there are the normal creeps.  Just a group of ten with no special abilities.  Next is group type spawns.  These little blue guys cluster ever so tightly together; which is great because it actually makes them easier to pop by most means.  Next are the annoying immune spawns.  One of the cannons you have at your disposal, the frost tower, slows creeps down in a splash radius and does some damage.  Immune creeps are unfazed by frost effects though and plow right along.  Next up are fast spawns.  These drop-shaped entities zoom right along at about double the speed of the other spawns.  Luckily the afore mentioned frost towers affect them just fine.  Flying spawns are next.  These yellow triangles are not blocked at all by towers and cannot be hit by some such as the bash and dart towers.  Finally are the accursed spawn creeps.  For the most part they’re only irritating.  That is until the boss shows up.  More on that in a moment.  Spawn creeps only arrive in groups of four but when you kill one it only splits in two.  Great, right?  So bosses are to be discussed.  For the most part they’re just larger versions of their counterparts but with greatly increased hitpoints.  The only difference is spawn boss.  He splits into two when first blasted and then each of those split into two again!  I think there’s one more level of splitting but I am unsure.

The towers at your disposal are varied.  The first one, the pellet tower, is a slow little gun that is the cheapest to build.  In the grand tradition of most games like this they are also some of the most powerful when fully upgraded.  At max level they turn into sniper towers who allow you to click on specific creeps to target as well as immensely increasing range and damage.  Following that we have the squirt tower.  This is much faster but does less damage.  When advanced all the way it becomes the typhoon tower which has slightly increased range and only a little less damage than the sniper towers.  Frost towers are fun.  I described them above and there’s really not much else to say; at top level they’re blizzard towers with slightly increased range and damage and as they increase the slow amount increases (almost imperceptibly).  Dart towers are basically missile launchers.  These cannot hit air but have a decent range and do splash damage around whatever they hit.  At max level as ICBM towers they have range almost as good as the sniper towers but don’t do as much damage.  Also they are mind numbingly slow.  General consensus around the office is that they are not really worth the trouble.  Swarm towers are fully anti-air and can hit nothing else.  They’re kind of like dart towers for flying creeps but do more damage with less range and are far faster.  Maxed out they become storm towers that are not too different from their earlier versions but do more damage and have greater range.  Lastly a new addition to the tower team as of recently are the bash towers.  They have a very small radius but when they ‘fire’ they damage everything in their radius with a chance to stun which increases with levels.  The problem with bash towers is that, even upgraded all the way to quake towers, their range never increases.  And even at max their stun percentage is only twenty percent.  They can be fun to play with but as they are also the most expensive to upgrade in the game they are usually left by the wayside.

So that’s about it.  When you get a chance give it a shot and let me know what you think.  This is everyone’s favorite gaming crab signing off.