Victoria (The Game)

Spent the weekend playing this. It is a strategy game set in the 19th. century. I took the USA. Discovered that the best way is to build up and then launch an early colonial war against Britain. It was important to launch the colonial war even though there's a 100 point loss in prestige because waiting for the various in-game opportunities to get a war "for free" results in a full-scale war where Britain can invade all your territories. In a colonial war, the combatants are not allowed to invade each other's states. I took over the NW territories that Britain would have conceded with the Oregon Compromise but this way, I got to snap up western Canada, too.

Launched a quick colonial war versus Russia in order to get Alaska. Then came the Mexican War in the 1840's. - A bunch of quick wars, but the result was an early domination of the North American continent. Now, I'm set to expand beyond it - after the Civil War, of course!

Facebook Adventures

I've now got 3 friends from the cast of the first season of Beauty and the Geek: Shawn, Chuck, and Caity. This was my fav season of my fav reality show. Sad to think that it was 5 years ago. Caity and Chuck were the team that won the thing. Shawn maintains a cool blog.

I'm still playing Mafia Wars. It is just a mindless game of clicking but it still has a certain charm. I'm at level 434. At the higher levels it is all about running missions. Fighting hardly matters. Even though the name of the game is "Mafia Wars", there is no reward for killing other players.

I discovered 2 similar games: Gangster City, and War Metal. Gangster City is played on a map of a city and has enough of a storyline to keep me interested. War Metal takes the same formula and extends it to the fighting. Here, when you fight another player, things happen. You take money and you get battle experience (BE). BE is another experience/leveling up system that operates independently of the regular system. You have one normal level and a different battle level. Battle levels get you access to other goodies that you don't get with ordinary levels.

What about Realm of Empires, you ask? It is such a great game and also demands so much time, I've had to cut way back. I became the most powerful player in my group and amassed over 50 towns. When tax season is over, I'll get back on it.

War Metal

I'm playing a Facebook game called "War Metal". This is looking pretty good. Most Facebook roleplaying games are knock-offs on the Mafia Wars formula. Same gameplay, only different settings.

This one adds layers of complexity and they make for better games. For example, the goal here is to not level up but to get the most powerful army. This means that you may not want to level up but to gather battle points and also tokens to unlock more powerful units.

This game has a lot of promise.

Board Games

A Monopoly term came up today. This reminded me that I don't see any "hits" in the stores anymore. The same games stock the shelves as when I was a boy. Clue, Life, and of course, Monopoly.

Why is this? Computer games are nice but for social purposes, there's nothing to beat gathering around a good old fashioned board game.

Diplomacy was a game that encouraged social inter-action. Its objective was to conquer Europe. People who played it as a wargame were unlikely to succeed. One had to acquire allies and that required talking. -Good old days!

Closing in on 50

Still playing Realm of Empires on Facebook. This has become my favorite game. I've got almost 50 towns. Most of them are cities. I'm trying to help my neighbors.

Mafia Wars: 30 levels/hour

Shawn Bakken wrote me on Facebook,

30 levels over the course of an hour? I smell something fishy here...

Fortuitous, not fishy, Shawn. Here’s how it went down.

I’ve been hanging out in Moscow, doing the usual bad stuff and gradually worked my way up just past level 300. After completing all the Russian jobs once, I flew to Cuba. Now those jobs are designed for levels 30 to 100, so I was over-rated for them. More importantly, the experience payout is almost 2 for 1 energy point expended. These are the highest rates in the game so far. In addition to this, I kept getting bonuses for being a top Mafia Mastermind and a top Wheelman.

I’ve been putting Godfather points (earned not bought) solely into skill points. Together with judicious use of attacks on other players, that what kept me on the level ladder.

One last thing: while I was in Russia, I did not let my Cuban business interests slip. I could see the jobs ahead and rather than just banking my Cuban business income, paying the 10% penalty, I had used the money instead to buy the necessary guns, thugs, and vehicles to do the jobs. That means, that I didn’t have to stop to buy inventory. It was just click, click, click. Oh, and all my points went into energy.

And that’s how I advanced 30 Mafia Wars levels in just a little over an hour.

P.S. Regrettably, that probably won’t happen again. I’ve completed all the jobs in Cuba and am back in Russia, where the experience payouts are way smaller.

Reader note: Shawn was a contestant in Season 1 on the greatest reality show ever, Beauty and the Geek. He made it to the penultimate round. He's a great guy. Check out his blog!

Realm of Empires

For the last month, I've been playing this game. It is one of those addictive, strategy games that can just eat up into all your time!

As you can see from the picture, it has a medieval setting. You start with one village and gradually acquire more villages. It has just a few elements. For example, resource gathering is limited to just 1 item. Fighting units come in 2 varieties: infantry (good for defense) and cavalry (good for offense). There are 2 varieties of each: light, cheap inf and cav; and the expensive, more powerful kind. Fortifications have 2 varieties, too: walls and towers. These are opposed by 2 kinds of siege weapons: rams for walls, and catapults for towers.

The overall product is elegant. Some folks get the idea that the more complicated the game, the better it is. Game design is like story telling in this one respect: it ought to have just enough elements to make the story work. Subplots and extra characters that don't advance the story end up detracting from it. The same goes for game elements. More units, more buildings, and more resources to gather should add focus to the strategic problems of the game. If they just make it more complicated, then they detract from it.

The problem for me is that this game has soaked up all my time! I've had to take a vacation away from it.

Mafia Wars: Banking

As a CPA, I’m already familiar with pre-tax and after-tax money. In this game, there’s pre-bank and after-banked money. The difference is 10%. Pay you hospital bills and buy things with pre-bank money.

The strategy guides on the net and even the official forum recommends putting all your skill points into energy. They emphasize the rapid increase of levels by using energy points to do jobs. The trade-off here is that your skill points aren’t going into the fighting skills – Attack and Defense. If you do this, you must bank your money and especially before you end each gaming session. The fighters will go after you. The name of the game is “Mafia Wars”, after all.

I invested skill points in fighting. This game is a social game, so many participants aren’t really players. They accumulate money and then when I attacked them, I collected huge hauls. All power-leveling meant to them was that there was more money for me to steal at higher levels.

Though this strategy does work as this screen I got of the Blogger's Picasa site proves. At 390 Energy, this guy's fighting skills couldn't be very much. What if a same-level mobster attacked him at this point?

Mafia Wars

I started playing this game a couple of days ago because my Facebook friends were playing it.

This is an internet-based role-playing game. You play it on Facebook or on MySpace. In a role-playing game, you create a character which represents you in the game world.

It is also a social game. This means that the more people you can recruit into your character’s “mob”, the stronger it becomes. This encourages you go go out and get “friends”, since only “friends” can be recruited. I put the word friends in quotes because, I notice that most people seem to connect as friends just to play the game. But that doesn’t mean that these “friends” cannot develop some personal relations as a result of the shared experience of playing this game.

Game strategy sites talk about “power-leveling”. This term means that people want to grow in strength. (I think that the phrase “take it to the next level” comes from the role-play game mechanics.) Levels is how the game defines advancement.

I think that the leveling process is largely an illusion, though. Yes, you gain more power and money as you level up, but the risks and costs go up, too. There is an inflation factor (in effect) built in to each role-playing game. For fights, what is important is the risk/reward ratio. For finances, it is the revenue/cost ratio.

My conclusion is to not worry about power-leveling, too much. I think that players will get the most enjoyment from just playing the game at the level they are at. Advancement in levels will come naturally.

Thanksgiving 08 - Hockey Game

This is from the big night's game: The Gwinnett Gladiators vs. the Augusta Lynx. Gwinett is the farm team for the NHL's Chicago Wolverines; Augusta is the farm team for the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning. Gwinett is NE of Atlanta.

My host for the game was Hank Harvey, a 26 year veteran of the game; a former semi-pro player and head coach. You can see my ignorance and his impatience with it. Anybody know this "Montreal Drill" he was talking about?