Event Review - Volleyball Tournament

I'm not in good shape. I work out three or four times a week, push some weights around, but it's really barely keeping up with the food that my nearly-forty body seems to want to keep packed on my ass regardless of how much or little I eat. Plus I smoke, and it certainly doesn't help keep me in shape when every third intake of breath sounds like someone stepping on a bag of potato chips.

So when the volleyball tournament at work asked for volunteers, my first inclination was a rousing, 'hell no.' But then I remembered my new-found commitment to trying stuff, and decided to give it a shot. Hell, when I was 19, we spent whole days playing volleyball in the sand down by the beach, shirts off to get a tan (and show off our killer abs), ogling girls and pretending we were cool. Well, OK, we were pretty cool. Broke, stupid, and lazy - but cool.

Since this was a work tournament, our team had to have three guys and three girls. The girls seemed to be coming out in droves, including some girls who had no business whatsoever playing any athletic event that involved exercise more strenuous than lifting a cheeseburger. But for the guys, it wound up being me and two work friends.

(If you work in an office, you know about work friends. These are guys that you generally like, but you've never been to their house, you never see them outside the office, and you wouldn't help them move unless they were paying in gold bullion. These are completely unlike actual friends, in that in the case of actual friends, you've slept on their sofas, shared motel rooms in the middle of Missouri, and would help them move a body. The other players on the team were most definitely work friends, and should not be confused for actual friends.)

Selecting uniforms seemed to be a priority, starting several days before the tournament. This was not good news for me, because I thought we were just going to play volleyball at work. In the end, we had stickers that we put on our shirts with the logo for our team. As we are so creative, the logo was a volleyball. And the shirts had to be gray, which created another problem for me, because I ended up playing in the only gray t-shirt I own, which happens to have a huge Thundercats insignia on the front (thank God I decided against picking up that Saved By The Bell shirt last summer).

The actual day of the tournament came, and it was hot. I don't know what kind of cosmic prankster decides that the end of October should be great weather for sunburn and heatstroke, but whoever it is, he must have created North Texas. We couldn't show up in shorts and t-shirts - it's an office job for the government, not a software company - so we all had to go down to the locker room and change. For the record, there is no situation I can imagine in which I want to see my work friends without pants (with the possible exception of a few female work friends, but in those cases, seeing them without pants would probably result in criminal charges or divorce proceedings).

Warming up takes on a whole new tone when you're nearly forty years old and it's nearly 90 degrees. After hitting the ball around for thirty minutes, we were all sweating like marathon runners (this may have had something to do with the extra layers of insulation most of us carry, but certainly had something to do with the fact that North Texas had apparently been teleported to Equitorial Africa for the day). We were also able to determine that we all completely sucked at volleyball.

The game itself allowed us to cement the notion that we were ill-equipped for strenuous physical activity. We ran out onto the sandy court, only to be displaced by our whiny competitors who showed up five minutes later and demanded that they be allowed to play from the side where we were currently attempting to remember how to rotate. We were then soundly trounced by a team who not only did not contain fat people, but who had held tryouts to determine the most appropriate warriors to exert their sports dominance. We rotated out a girl every time so that everyone could have equal play time, while they had six players who probably should have been tested for anabolic steroids. I continue to be amazed at anyone who takes winning this seriously, especially when there was absolutely nothing whatsoever at stake. The losers, in fact, got to hit the showers first, because the winners had to stay and play again.

We did encounter one thing that the winners probably did not - incredible pain. All the guys were about the same age, which is to say we are way too old to be diving face-first into anything that is not an overstuffed sofa. After twisting, jumping, diving, and otherwise doing things normally reserved for high-school athletes and trained pole dancers, we were having trouble walking. I thought I was at least somewhat healthy, but it's been nearly a week now, and my back still makes a sound like the lid coming off a can of Pringles every time I try to look over my shoulder.

So, to sum up:

1) I got a sunburn.
2) I had to shower with men (though I understand this is common in sports).
3) We got soundly trounced to the point that we would have been embarrassed, if we weren't so damned proud that we were able to actually play in the first place.
4) We all twisted, sprained or tore something.

And after all that, we decided to do it every week.

What? It was fun!

Summary

Pros:
Get exercise and have fun at the same time

Cons:
Who cares about cons. It's fun.

Board Game Review - Bolide

I like racing games, especially games that let me really feel like I'm hurtling through turns, barely in control of a super-powerful racing machine, shredding the tires and smoking the brakes in a neck-and-neck, hell-bent-for-leather contest of wills. In other words, I really like Formula D.

But this review is not about Formula D. Tonight's game is called Bolide, which probably means something if you're from Italy, and just confuses me because the only Italian I know, I learned from Sopranos, and so most of the words I know have to do with things you might do in the bathroom. It's a racing game very similar in theory to Formula D, in that you're driving race cars around a really big race track, trying to go as fast as you can afford without flying off the track and into the stands, where you can make some unlucky woman an instant widow.

However, aside from being a racing game, Bolide really doesn't have much in common with Formula D. Rather than rolling to see how many spaces you move, Bolide pretty much lets you decide how far you want to go, and then penalizes you if you do something stupid, like hit the gas going into a hairpin turn. It uses a rather ingenious method of simulating physics - you move your car, tracking which direction you went, and then you make the exact same move with a little pawn that tells you where you can go next turn. So if you went seven spaces forward and two to the left, then on your next turn, your pawn will be seven spaces ahead and two to the left.

The pawn indicates the center of a bunch of places you can end your next turn, but it's actually kind of a small area, especially if you're really hauling ass. Completely understanding how this works would require you to read the rules, play the game, and then read the rules again (at least, it did for me), so I'm not going to spend half an hour trying to figure out how to explain all the ins-and-outs. Instead, I'll just say that Bolide does a better job simulating the physics of speeding cars that any other game I've ever played. It's not just clever, it's downright brilliant.

That pawn thing is the heart and soul of Bolide, but there are several more rules that help to make this a really cool racing game. Sharp braking lets you juice it hard into a turn and then slow down fast when you need it, and you can hit your boosters now and then for a little extra kick, if you're feeling lucky. There are enough rules for this to be a whole game, though the poorly translated rulebook does a Godawful job of explaining them. There are even advanced rules for customizing your car and driving in the rain. It's a good game.

However, I don't think I'll probably play it again. It's terrifically smart, but it's not the fast-paced burning rubber that I love about Formula D. There's a lot of counting off spaces and calculating your move, and while it's absolute genius, it makes what should be a game about roaring engines and gutsy drivers into a careful series of calculations and long-term planning. If I didn't already have Formula D, and love the bejeezus out of it, I would probably want to play Bolide all the time, but I do, so I won't.

Plus it's a total bitch to work through the rules. As far as I can tell, the rulebook is translated into English from Italian by a Bolivian living in Japan who speaks Urdu as a first language. There are words in there that I don't even think exist in English, and if they do, I'm pretty sure he's not using them correctly. If it weren't for the pictures, I don't think I could even have played the game. I've seen some pretty bad translations, but this one is the worst.

And while the little plastic cars are cool, the tracks really fail by comparison when you put them up against the gorgeous art in the new Formula D. It's like the designers of this game wanted you to be bored. It doesn't work - I really did enjoy Bolide - but it's not for the art, I'll tell you that.

Now, to be fair, I want to be clear that I like my racing games with a heaping helping of kick-ass, with the careful planning in a cup on the side. If you really like to think about what you're doing, and you're good at working out your moves in advance, you'll probably love Bolide. I do like it, and I think it's really smart, but when I head into a turn, I don't smell the overheated engines and feel the tires slipping on the asphalt as I push just a little harder to overtake the one lucky bastard who hit a lucky upshift. Instead I smell the scented candle we just lit to try to compensate for having dogs, and wonder if I set a timer for Dexter. I just can't get into it like I do with Formula D, so I'll keep playing the game I know I love.

I like my racing games fast and crazy, and on that front, Bolide doesn't deliver, no matter how stunningly brilliant it might be.

Summary

Pros:
A physics simulation mechanic that is absolute genius
Good, well-rounded rules that let you test your technical aptitude
Virtually no luck - the best driver will win, just about every time

Cons:
Translation is hilariously bad
Substitutes realism and smart play for speed and thrill factor

While I can't give Bolide a blanket recommendation, gamers who like to really think about their racing games will probably dig the hell out of it. If you're one of those gamers, you can get Bolide from Dogstar Games. And why should you buy it from Dogstar Games? Because it's cheap, you get free shipping, and because if they hadn't sent me a copy, you wouldn't have been able to read about it. So if you're going to get it, get it here:
http://www.dogstargames.com/product/RIO079

Game Review - Summoner Wars

Tonight is a great night. I've been looking forward to writing this review for nearly a year and a half, and finally, after all the waiting, I get to reveal one of my absolute favorite games. It's called Summoner Wars, and it was the best game I played at GenCon 2008. The reason you haven't heard of it before now, however, is because you can't buy it yet.

Yeah, OK, that's a little confusing, so I'll explain. The guy who made Summoner Wars is a good friend of mine. He has done a ton of work for Hasbro, including several projects I'm not sure I'm supposed to tell you about (I think they involve regular Langley contacts and maybe a secret black list). He's been refining Summoner Wars for something like two years now. The first time I tried it was two GenCons ago. He broke out this set of home-printed cards with art he cribbed from a video game and said, 'hey, wanna try my game?' It was so much fun, it was all I could think about for the rest of the time I was there. I got to play it again at GenCon this August, and was amazed at how much it had improved. Considering the original was my favorite game of GenCon 2008, I was damned impressed that it was so much better a year later.

At its most basic, Summoner Wars is a tactical card-based game where you try and kill the other guy. You have one leader, your summoner, and if you lose him, you lose the game. He calls up his troops, grunts and warriors and heroes and the stuff of legend, and they run amok causing bloodshed and mayhem. So this is the kind of game men play (but women can totally play, too).

Where it gets amazing is the incredible amount of tactical decision-making and strategic planning that goes into the game. Every fighter has some kind of special ability that breaks the rules, so they might run faster, or hit harder, or go out of turn, or otherwise just be irritating. You have a grid where all the action occurs, with each card-slash-warrior moving a few spaces, hitting hard, and hoping to live through the next turn. It's like one of those reality shows on Bravo with the fashion designers, only instead of breaking down in tears and acting all gay when they get sent home, the soldiers on this field just die. So it's approximately 273 times more entertaining, with an added plus that you don't actually get dumber when you play.

Summoning your brawlers isn't as easy as just plunking down a warrior and saying, 'there he is. Bite me.' In order to bring in your troops, you have to spend cards from your magic pile. And in order to have troops in your magic pile, you have to either kill enemies (their deaths power your spells) or dump cards from your hand. Some decks can drain your opponent's magic pile, or improve your own, or make your own guys cheaper to summon. You'll almost never have enough magic to summon everything you want.

Deciding what to do on your turn tends to be a matter of limited resources and too many objectives. You want to crowd the enemy walls to keep him from summoning, but you also want to protect your summoner. You want to keep a constant supply of cards in your magic pile, but you also want to hang on to those game-breaker cards that can turn the tide, even if you don't have enough power to make them work just yet. You can't play too offensively, or you'll leave your summoner wide open, but you also can't let your opponent have the run of the field, or he'll set up such a tidal wave of brutality, it will look like a Mortal Kombat fatality move. You'll want to keep a careful watch on both sides, both to make sure that your opponent isn't setting up an ambush, and to take advantage of opportunities to set your own.

It may sound a little like this is just a new CCG, but it's definitely not. For one thing, when you buy both starters, you're getting all the cards there are. For another thing, you need the cards to tell you what you're summoning, and track hits and stuff, but once they're on the board, they act more like miniatures than any game of Magic: The Financial Raping. They move around, stab each other in the man tackle, and shoot each other from a distance. There's a definite card play aspect to Summoner Wars, but it's more of a tactical maneuvering game than a card game.

The first release of Summoner Wars is made up of two boxes, each with two decks. You can play Phoenix Elves, Tundra Orcs, Guild Dwarves or Cave Goblins. Each deck has its own play style, complete with advantages and disadvantages, but after two years of testing, they're all very balanced against each other. Will you swarm your opponent with goblins, or take quality over quantity with the dwarves? Do you take unreliable raw power with the orcs, or employ the rather expensive precision of the elves? Knowing the decks is a decided advantage, but even a new player can win, if he is cautious and smart.

Now, the astute reader might wonder how I can be objective when the creator of Summoner Wars is a friend. And while most of you don't know me from a hole in the wall (and some of you might actually prefer the hole), I can point to more than one review where I beat the crap out of a game made by a friend. Hell, I've panned two games from Small Box Games, and that guy shared my booth at GenCon.

I know I've been handing out a lot of high praise recently, and I hope to find something soon that really stinks so I can compare it to dirty feet or loose bowels. For now, you'll just have to read about how much I adore Summoner Wars. And you'll want to go put in your preorder right now, because by God this is one of the best games I've played in a long, long time - I mean like Heroscape good - and you'll want to have these in your hands as soon as you can. Plus your preorder gets you the promo. You know you're a sucker for the promo.

Summary

Pros:
Easy to learn and play
Immense tactical and strategic depth
Fantastic art
Balanced and well-tested

Cons:
May be addictive

You can preorder yourself some Summoner Wars right here, and if you like games, you should:
http://www.plaidhatgames.com/store.html