The first Games With Garfield audio game review harvests a popular board game called Agricola. From zero level strategy to the passive aggressive German player interaction, game designers Tyler Bielman, Skaff Elias and Richard Garfield cover it all. Oh, and there’s a pig of indeterminate European origin. Listen now!
LINKS: Agricola | Race for the Galaxy | Puerto Rico | Dominion
Settlers of Catan
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Agricola [ 17:23 ] The computer game concepts that most interest me, and most engage my computer game design time, are those that bridge the paper game world and the traditional computer game world. If you play a game like Scrabble, or Bridge, or Magic online your experience is vastly different than Starcraft or Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. Why are there so few games in the gulf between these designs?
There are a few, and one of my favorites is Quadradius. It feels like a board game, but is not at all a mere transliteration of a board game. It brings the strengths of the computer to more traditional game design without the burden of trying to be a simulation.
I have always been hesitant to review games because I think negative reviews are important, but it pains me giving them and for a game designer it can seem self serving to give them. But I do have a lot to say in terms of game review and have recently come up with an idea of how to approach it. My main interest in game review is to evaluate games in terms of a criteria that are important to me, and often, I believe, underappreciated. One game that scores well in terms of these criteria is Poker – not Texas Hold’em or any form of poker in particular, but poker as a family of games. Another game that scores well, and may cover any weaknesses poker has is Cosmic Encounter. My game reviews are going to focus on my search for their lovechild – Cosmic Poker. Games will have these characteristics in varying degrees – which won’t in generally correspond to them being good or bad in anyones mind, but perhaps closer or further from Cosmic Poker.