A good thing too as, if I remember, we always had the problem that the darn thing never really lived up to the hype.  Well, someone has taken the frustration you and I felt as children and put that to song.

The song is a parody of the recent OK Go song “This Too Shall Pass” in which they created a rather large and complicated Rube Goldberg machine.  Their’s, however, did actually work.

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Dungeon Lords, from creator Vlaada Chvatil, flips the age old game on its head.  Instead of being the victorious warrior attacking the evil overlords castle to save whoever it is you’re supposed to be saving this time to finish the King’s quest, you’re that same said Evil Overlord trying to defend as much of your dungeon from those pesky drunken wannabe knights (pronounced:  kiiniig-hits ala Monty Python.)

Throughout gameplay you build your dungeon, release trolls, vampires, ghosts, and other ghoulies, farm gold, and store food for the winter attacks.  Spreading imps to do your dirty work for you, the game processes as the supposed “good guys” build up their raiding party and you dig deeper into your dungeon while planting traps to take care of the meddling menace.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this game a solid 8.  There are multiple strategies you can deploy, and yes, the deck is stacked against you.  The board is beautifully designed and the game pieces equally so.  I usually go a bit overboard on the imps and not strong enough on the monsters, but choose your own strategy to protect your sacred dungeons from those meddling villagers after your well stocked booty.

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Well, thanks to Brian, I’ve found BretSpielWelt.  A German site that has versions of all of the above mentioned games and many more.  Stone Age, Settlers of Catan, Dominion, all can be found and played easily through your browser.

One suggestion, don’t use Google Chrome for this site.  Sure it’s fast, but I don’t think the creators of BretSpielWelt have optimized for Chrome.  I’ve had no trouble with Firefox though.

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Recently our good friend Mike at Tasty Minstrel Games sent us review copies of Terra Prime and Homesteaders.  So first of all, thanks Mike, you rock, and we hope you have a few more games in the pipeline to expand on your collection.

We played both games, and we’ll be throwing a review of Homesteaders up in the future.  Now, onto the Terra Prime review.

The goal of Terra Prime is to take over planets and asteroid belts while exploring space with your ship.  You collect Bluium, Greenium, Yellium, and Brownium to help fuel your ship, buy new supplies, and bribe alien attackers.

The layout is very “Tongiaki: Journey into the Unknown” combined with “The Settlers of Catan” with a little “Rio Grande Games Galaxy Trucker” thrown in on the side.  I have to tell you outright, that the first time you play this game, it’s going to take you longer to set it up correctly than it will to actually play through the game.

So you take your ship and “explore” new regions in space.  If you happen upon a planet you have the ability (depending upon your supplies) to colonize and start producing.  Blue planets produce Bluium, yellow produce Yellium, and green produce Greenium.  (Don’t you just love the names.  We got a kick out of those.)

During your explorations you’ll also come across Asteroids and Aliens.  Asteroids you’ll first have to navigate through.  After that you have the option to either colonize or leave them alone.  Colonized Asteroids do not have to be navigated again, uncolonized ones do, so be careful.  If you do choose to colonize an Asteroid they’ll produce your Brownium.

If you come across some aliens you have two choices.  If you’ve been able to upgrade your ship you might choose to attack them and take your chances.  In playing we found that it was preferable to bribe the aliens instead.  Sure you lose a few resources, but you take care of the threat and with the official rules, you get a few resources back as well.  (I’ll talk about an alternative option in a bit.)

Overall, I personally liked the game.  The others weren’t as hot on it, but I could see that with a few tweaks and unofficial rule changes it could be a good game to keep in the collection.  I’d want to make sure I played with people who had been through the game before as the rules are rather lengthy (I’ve attached them to this post if you’d like to download them, and they’re available at the official Terra Prime site.)

Now, about those rule tweaks I mentioned.  First, the rules say that when you’ve defeated or bribed an attacking alien you use a Reward tile to cover them so you know you don’t have to kill or bribe them again.  I don’t like this as it speeds up the game play too much.  Instead we used the Support tiles to cover the aliens (they have no other real use) and then collected a resource cube from each of the other players.  The payoff is usually better, but the other players got to decide what the briber got so as not to make it really worthwhile to run around only bribing aliens.

The second tweak that we tried was ignoring the END at the bottom.  We stopped when one of two options happened, either we explored the entire region (all tiles were flipped) or we ran out of Reward tiles.  This allowed the game to last a little longer and made the adventure more fun.

Overall, I’ll give the game a 3 out of 5.  It’s got a place in the closet now, but there is a possibility of it being bumped if/when something better comes along.

Terra Prime Rulebook

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I think it’s important that we take whatever strides we can to change the world for the better, regardless of what your version of better is.  I find it interesting that someone is out there studying how online games can lead us to that future.

So, while I don’t play WoW (as I’ve mentioned before) I think there’s more to this than that simple forum.  I think that those of us who love and enjoy games are better suited to helping the world because we’re used to working together and socializing in ways that will allow us to make the changes necessary.

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When my wife and I got to Dallas for BGG.con the forst game that we were asked if wanted to Learn was Tichu.  It was love at first “bomb”.  We literally cannot get a group of people together without someone asking if we can play it.

Enjoy our video.  IT was tough to get all the info into less than ten minutes, so if you have questions or comments we’d love to hear from you.  We love this game, and I’m sure you would also if get the opportunity to play.

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With our recent cutbacks on games purchasing, I’ve been trying to get out some games that haven’t been played yet.  I received one Richard Breese game (Key Harvest)  from Rio Grande about a year ago (thanks to Jay Tummelson) and I also received a copy of Reef Encounter as “payment” from Z-man games for doing some demos at our local game stores.

It doesn’t happen often, but we played both of these in one night and I got a drastically different feeling from these two games by the same designer.  Here are my impressions about both games.

Reef Encounter:

The first thing you notice about this game is how pretty it is.  I’m a sucker for great art and bits and this is great.  Very colorful and very pretty as the game gets going.  The one complaint that was voiced was from my wife and mother-in-law.  They noticed that the consistency in the colors of the tiles, cubes, and other items weren’t quite matching.  I’d agree.  There were two different shades of pink, the purples were really different, and the polyps that they called “grey” looked black in the pictures.  It was easy to get over really quick, but it was something we noticed.

This game plays great.  It’s a good blend between a game that has a lot of options and depth, but is also very accesible and easy to learn.  We cruised over to Boardgameswithscott.com to watch his tutorial video and we were off.  It’s definitely a game that takes a few times playing to get a good idea of strategy, but you can dive right in and have fun even if you don’t know what you’re doing.  The great thing is that there is a bunch of downtime in between your turns, but you don’t notice it.  There are so many things changing and fluxing in between, you have to pay attention, and know what’s going on.  I felt a really interesting flow of colors, bits, and player scores through the whole game.  The only other game I have that gives me this feel is a game by Frank Nestel called Primordial Soup.  REally great game and we really enjoyed our first play.  It earned a spot in our cupboard.

Key harvest:

This was another story.  I’ve suspended my disbelief before that a game about farming could be a great game after playing and enjoying Agricola and Bohnanza. I guess it’s not as much about farming as it is about economics of agriculture.  I was throughly bored and drained by playing this game.  By the time we were about halfway through I couldn’t wait until it was over.  This is not because I wasn’t winning.  I was actually in the lead the whole time and ended up winning the game, but I didn’t care.  The art was horrendous and confusing, and there wasn’t very much flexibility based on the way the board was set up.  Kind of like Acquire, every tile could only be placed on certain areas of the board.  These tiles had different types of crops that could be harvested from them.  you would think that this would make a sense of competition and fighting to get the parts that you wanted but it didn’t.  Each person kind of decided that they would just occupy one side of the board and play their own game.  There is a store function that allows you to put things up for sale to the other players.  This never gets used too effectively, becasue everyone just takes the ones they want themselves, and then sets the price s high that no one else will buy thema nd they can claim them for themselves.

Overall, one great game, one total stinker.  Richard Breese, the jury’s still out.  There area  lot of others I want to try but in the meantime I’m going to keep my gaming in the Reef, and out of the Field.

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While the film didn’t have the high budget that I personally believe it deserved, it was still amazingly well put together.  The characters were impressively in depth, and the dialog is almost as quotable as “The Princess Bride” (likely the most quotable movie ever.)

I’m not going to go into depth on what the movie is about, but if you have a Netflix account or video store nearby, go watch it now.  If you’re not tearing up with laughter by the end, then you should head to the doctor to have your sense-of-humor repaired.

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