A Final Lack Of Gaming

In a few days, the Playstation 3 and the Wii come out, all my game systems will be obsolete, and I'll no longer count as a gamer. I suppose that I can eventually convince myself to purchase a Wii based on cheapness, and perhaps join hands with the Gamers Who Hate Games that the Wii is marketed towards. Not that I blame them, after seeing a friend manhandled by Bully's "We use every button on your controller, even the ones you didn't know existed!" design. The fact that the game waits to give instructions on how to use button #13 until a chase scene probably didn't help. It'll be interesting to see if cutting down on the number of buttons will end up making a more intuitive game or just an entirely different skillset to memorize. Replace "interesting" with "frustrating" in the previous sentence if the Wii experiment fails.

So, last week I never really did talk about games I didn't play, but still ought to. Here's a pair for your consideration.

A Game Of Thrones is a smartly designed boardgame that works in all the ways Axis-and-Allies style games usually don't. For one thing, a lot of the action happens simultaneously, so you don't have to deal with thirty-minute breaks in between your turns. Also, while there's a welcome element of randomness in the game, combat is wholly strategic. (At least, I'm happy about that, seeing as how I can count on my dice to betray me more often than not.) Unfortunately, the game balance pretty much requires that you have the maxiumum of five players. Otherwise, get used to the despairing wail of "King of the North!" as whoever plays the Starks gets beaten down.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers is the less-popular sequel to the original Carcassonne. Control an entire tribe of French cavemen struggling to score you points in a gleefully passive-aggressive game. Instead of attacking your opponents, you just happen set up tragic accidents wherein they're kicked out of prime hunting grounds. Since a number of the people I play with react poorly to being assaulted, this is quite a good thing.

The original Carcassonne is also fairly decent, but its scoring system feels unbalanced, although that is partially fixed in a number of complicated expansion packs. But it's the only version I ever see in stores when I remember that I need to buy my own copy of Hunters and Gathrers since I've moved, and I'd rather not pay thirty bucks for its weak sister.