Greetings and salutations loyal readers. Thanks for coming back. Without further ado…the blog.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my five-day weekend. It’s been a nice period of rest and relaxation punctuated with a lot of game playing (mostly digital).
Last Tuesday at La Crique o Jeux I tried out Kingdom Builder and enjoyed it. So much so, that I ran out and bought it on Saturday. The game play is simple, draw a card and place three houses in the terrain type shown on the card you drew. The trick is that whenever possible each house you set down has to touch another of your houses already in play. Each game you choose four boards to make the map and three cards which detail how to score points for that game. This increases the replayability of the game as you’ll never get the same set-up twice in any given night. Each board also has locations which will give special powers to the first two players to build a house adjacent to them, which adds even more variety. I will say that the game plays okay at two, but is really better with more players (the base set is for up to four players and one of the expansions allows for a fifth).
I also acquired NHL Big League Manager and…it’s not that great. I really should have read up more on it before I bought it. It’s a roll-and-move game very much like Monopoly. There are some nice touches here and there, but overall it’s just a big luck fest. There’s no skill whatsoever involved in playing. I will give it a leg up on Monopoly for being much shorter to play.
On the digital side, I downloaded Pandemic, Summoner Wars and Ascension for my Android phone. Pandemic and Summoner Wars were good but Ascension is really addictive. It’s a deck-building game which seems to have been the inspiration for Cryptozoic’s Cerebus game system. The artwork is terrible but the game play is fast and fluid with some great cards which allow for fun combos. I’ve been playing a LOT of Ascension and bought it on Steam so I can just play on the computer as well.
I rounded things out game-wise with my usual helpings of HearthStone and Star Wars Heroes and things are progressing in those games nicely.
On Sunday night we went to see Batman v. Superman and it was surprisingly decent. Warner Bros. really haven’t had a great track record when it comes to superhero movies with their insistence in keeping everything dark and broody so I didn’t have really high expectations for the movie and the movie got roasted by the critics. I thought it was good but way too long. If they could have shaved off a half hour, it would have been even better. Really they tried to cram too much into the movie. Today there’s just no need to include Batman’s origin in a movie. We all know the story so doing so adds nothing to the narrative except eat up time that could be better used to advance the current plot.
That’s about all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday with my thoughts on Wrestlemania weekend. Carja V.