We tackled a large scale game in Starcraft this past month (though not nearly as large scale as Twilight Imperium by far). Starcraft is an appealing adaptation of an enormously popular real-time strategy game on the PC. We thought this would be an interesting game to study (much like when we played Doom) since it [...]
So, we’ve covered digital game-to-board game adaptation briefly in our game session in the past (re: Doom the Board game and currently Starcraft) and intend to focus more so on it in the coming weeks with the Starcraft board game. Ian Bogost posted recently about a fun find in board game history: http://www.bogost.com/blog/zimmer_base_ball_and_cigars.shtml
So, my visit to the board games colloquium was interesting. It is a distinct academic gaming culture (made up of historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, game theoreticians, and archaeologists) that has been gathering for over a decade. The quality of the talks, as expected, was pretty varied - but there were a few gems that [...]
From boingboing.net:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/27/boardgame-pricefixin.html
A board-game publisher has begun engaging in price fixing, a practice newly liberalized in the US in the wake of a June Supreme Court decision. Yehuda sez,
So, Ben posited the question earlier:
I’m wondering, since the computer does a lot of the calculations for you does that seem to take away the “mechanic”. Picking a skill to use and rolling die are taken away and made quicker decisions for instance in Doom. Does that add or take away from [...]
We have played a game of Settlers of Catan as a five person game…which is fairly different of a game. All players can do more actions each turn. This likely was introduced to keep people involved in the game, as turns can be dragged out as players make difficult decisions. I have [...]
We have gotten through two solid sessions of playing Ra, enough to constructively talk about the game but not enough to satiate our desire to play it. Ra is a fairly simple, easy-to-learn game that can be very engrossing after a single time playing it.
We want to discuss these games and answer key questions [...]