Multi-player – Page 9 – Random Geek Child

Burn In Hell

No, no, I’m not being rude or mean, and I’m not shouting at anyone today, I promise. That’s just the name of the game! That’s right, Burn In Hell is an actual game, and it’s loads of fun!

In Burn In Hell, you’re Demon princes (or princesses) fighting over the souls in the “Permanent Pitchfork Party.” The deck is made up of notable souls from throughout history — dictators, tycoons, serial killers, etc. Each card has their name (of course), an illustration, a biography (on the back), and actual mechanics-relevant material. These include their special ability, if applicable, and a number of categories: the value of the card, the “tags” (dictator, tycoon, serial killer, etc.), and however many of the Seven Deadly Sins apply.

It is with these traits that you match up groups, “Circles,” of four or more souls to score points. The mechanics for getting there are complicated, involving roundly sacrifices to the Pit, trading with the Pit, trading with other players, burning souls, and incredibly complicated multi-trade maneuvers, but basically, you’re trying to get groups of cards that either all share at least one trait (bonus points for more) or represent the Seven Deadly Sins, one each. The value of the cards involved, combined with the combo bonuses, along with any special pairings (some people who had met in life give you extra points if they end up in circles together) are added to your score.

While it’s important to make Circles wisely, you also need to make them quickly — the value of the cards sacrificed to the Pit each turn determine how much colder Hell gets, and the game ends when Hell freezes over. If you don’t watch the temperature, you could end up losing by a turn to your mother, and having to listen to her bemoan the irony in her winning score of 665.

Chrononauts — But Bigger

I’ve already written about Chrononauts — a fun game of time travel, artifact collection, and screwing with timelines. But now, I’d like to introduce you to ÜberChrononauts: the ambitious combination of original Chrononauts with its prequel, Early American Chrononauts. In other words, twice the timeline, twice the cards, twice the chaos!

So what’s different? Well, besides having mixed both decks for fun variety, the end of the game is a bit different. In either game on its own, you win by completing your (one) mission, returning to the timeline of your (one) ID, or getting ten cards in hand. In ÜberChrononauts, you need to complete one of your (two) missions, one of your (two) IDs, and get ten cards in hand. Not all at once, of course, once you’ve completed one of those objectives you mark it as complete, without worrying about keeping the criteria for it intact. That would be even more confusing. Yikes. Also, rather than 13 paradoxes blowing up the universe, those 13 have to be in four consecutive rows.

Worried about sorting the two decks back out once it’s over? Don’t be! While the backs of the cards are the same, all of the Early American cards (except the timeline) have a little star in one of the top corners. The timeline is set off by, rather than the original’s coordinates of A-D, having designations of W, X, Y, and Z, allowing the few intermixed dates in the middle of the map to be returned to their own decks with no hassle.

All in all, it’s a longer, more complicated version of a brilliantly fun game. So, if you’ve got the time and the dedication to your many missions, play some ÜberChrononauts for some ÜberChaos!

Welcome to Jumanji!… Fluxx!

Yep, another Fluxx. Specifically, the Fluxx that ended up in my Christmas stocking this year. (As well as a Doctor Who Fluxx 13th Doctor expansion pack, but that’s sidelining…) Don’t worry, there’ll be no spoilers here for the Jumanji films; I haven’t even seen the new one yet. More importantly, I’m not actually focusing on the plot, because, well… this is Fluxx. Plot? What plot? We make our own plots here, thank you very much.

Anyways, I’m not really here to talk about Fluxx, or the new Keepers and Goals for this version of it, as I am to talk about what’s new and different about the game mechanics in this version. I mean, sure, there are some interesting new cards — I definitely don’t recall having seen “Let’s Keep Doing That” as a New Rule before — but that’s not really big news.

The really big news is that there are Danger cards — cards with a yellow and black border that allow players to be “eliminated.” Elimination is both more and less drastic than it sounds — you lose all your cards, both your Keepers and the ones in hand, but after everyone else has taken a turn, you draw a hand of three cards and play from there. So you’re not out, you’re just kind of… starting over. The conditions for these danger cards are usually based around Keepers, like saying, “If a player has Albino Rhinos in front of them, that player is eliminated.” I may or may not have used a whole slew of Danger cards on Mom. What can I say? I grew up on Munchkin.

There are also optional Meta Rules, which we didn’t play with this time around, but as I understand it there are two of them. The first, if used, gets placed next to the Basic Rules in the middle, and indicates that you must shout “Jumanji” when you win the game. The second, “No More Lives,” gets placed at the bottom of the deck, and once it comes up it, elimination is permanent.

I should also probably mention that, like “The Doctor” and “Companions” in Doctor Who Fluxx, Jumanji Fluxx has certain cards marked as “Adventurers” and “Animals,” which for certain card mechanics are interchangeable amongst themselves.

Narwhales!

One of the many games that I play online is called Narwhale. Aww! Sounds nice, kind of sweet, right? Haha, nope. Narwhale is a very simple game where you’re all — surprise! — narwhales, and you’re trying to kill each other by impalement, courtesy of tusks. A good example is this image, where I’m less than 1.5 seconds away from getting skewered by someone who’s about to make a sharp turn into my side.

“Why would you want to kill the other narwhales, though?” Well, that’s a good question. For starters, they’re all trying to kill you. You also get bonuses for each level you get (you advance the number of levels that each narwhale you kill has), like stamina (the little dots by your tusk, those are how many dashes you have left at a given time), stamina regeneration, dash speed, general speed, tusk length, turn rate… that sort of thing. You can see each upgrade for a moment as you get it, and then the words fade so that you can actually, you know, see what you’re doing.

Of course, bonuses that make it easier to kill shouldn’t really be the only reward to killing, should they? Of course not! It’s mostly for the rush of exhilaration when you get out of a tight spot, or see your username on the Leaderboard in the top right corner (if you don’t put one in, you’ll come up as “Lazy Narwhale”) or, if you do really well, get a crown for being the top player. Your tusk also turns into a kebab if you hit max tusk length, so that’s fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots of my crown/kebab combo, since I was a bit busy trying not to die, but I do have one with just a crown.

It should also be noted that digital narwhales seem to be contortionists, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether they’re missing the back half of their body, therefore dying and no longer a threat, or whether they’re scrunched up, like the little greige-ish dude near the bottom of that last picture. Unfortunately, that’s an unavoidable result of high speed turning, so just know that it’s something to watch out for.

We Must Survive Surviv!

Yes, you read that right, and no, it isn’t a typo. Surviv is a third person shooter game, meaning you see your character from an overhead view. I’ve been told that it’s the 2-D version of Fortnight, but I can neither confirm nor deny that, seeing as I haven’t played Fortnight.

You destroy crates to get guns, ammo, grenades, melee weapons, outfits, medical supplies, and gear, which can also be found lying around sometimes. You may also find scopes, which increase your field of view. There are different types of ammo for the different types of guns (they’re color-coded), and different guns within each type. Everyone has their own preferences; I like the yellow-ammo weaponry because they tend to have large clips, and I’m not the most accurate shot.

Medical supplies are split into two groups, which I call “healing” and “adrenaline.” Healing supplies are bandages and med kits, which directly restore health. Adrenaline supplies are consumed, and then gradually give you health back until the adrenaline bar runs out. Gear is split into backpacks, helmets, and armor, each of which has three levels of possibility. Obviously, the higher the level, the better. Outfits are mostly useless, but there are a few that provide excellent camouflage.

The game has a “last one standing” premise to it. As the game progresses, the map gradually gets smaller as the “Red Zone” moves inwards. Standing in the Red Zone is possible, but your health decreases. You can see where the Red Zone will be moving to at any given time in the mini map, which is expandable if you hit “M.” How you survive is up to you – some people like to attack anything that comes near them until they’re the only one left, and some like to hide in bushes until they’re one of the last people left, and then they attack the remaining adversaries. It’s up to you!

You can also play “Squad,” either with random other players or with a group of friends. Let me tell you, it is an excellent experience to try and play this game with a group of teenagers in various, spread-out locations in the same room (*cough* passing period *cough*). It’s insane.

Squads are nice because you can communicate with your team to ask for certain supplies or ask them to go somewhere. You also don’t die immediately. Instead, you go to a slow and helpless crawl until one of your teammates revives you or you bleed out, which sounds awful, but it’s nice to get a second chance, and it rewards team members who stay with the rest of the squad by increasing their chances of revival.

It can take a little while to acclimate to the controls, but if you play enough it becomes automatic. Right click is communication/drop this item, left click is attack, , WASD are movement, 1-4 are selections of weapons (gun, gun, melee, grenade), F is to pick something up or open and close doors, and M is the map.

We’re On Tour!

Now, wait, don’t get too excited, I’m not actually going on tour. Rather, I’m talking about a game called On Tour, in which you’re musicians trying to plan a tour to hit as many states as you can. It’s like 10 Days In The USA, right? Well, no.

On Tour board game with most of the locations filled in

For starters, it’s played on an erasable board with dry erase markers, but that’s not all. You see, in On Tour, you can only go to adjacent states in a given move. You’re also not going to only ten states, you’re going to as many as you can. And where you’re going isn’t based off of the color on the board, nor on adjacency alone, it’s also based on numbers. “What have numbers got to do with this,” you ask? Let me explain.

Each round, you flip over three state cards, and roll a pair of dice. You’ll get two numbers from the dice, once with the first die in the tens digit and the second in the ones, and one vice versa. For instance, if you roll a 2 and a 6, one of your numbers will be 26, and one will be 62. You then put each number in a state within at least one of the regions of the flipped cards, or, if you roll doubles, you put a star on one state in the available regions instead, which serves as a wild number. You can circle the number/star if you put it in one of the states you flipped, and not just the region. Eventually, every state will have a number or a star.

When finalizing the tour route, you can only go to a state of equal or greater numerical value to the one before it, so the game is a challenge of lining up the numbers in a manner that allows the most states without spreading them out so far that a stray number blocks the path. You also get bonus points for each circled state you visit, so try to incorporate as many of those as you can!

Welcome To Catan!

I’ve mentioned Kids of Catan before, but it was recently brought to my attention that I haven’t spoken about Settlers yet. Settlers of Catan is a game of resource collection, building, trading, and, of course, backstabbing.

Each person starts with a settlement and a road. The settlement is at the intersection of three hexagonal tiles, each with resources on them. There are five resources – ore, lumber, wheat, brick, and sheep. There’s also the desert, which people avoid starting adjacent to because it has no practical purpose to neighbor. Each resource tile has a number on it. When that number is rolled, every settlement adjacent to any tile with that number gets the resource specified on that tile.

Resources can be used for many things, namely, building. Building roads, building settlements, building cities…. They can also be used to trade for things you do want, either with other players or with the bank, though usually the deal is better with people. You can also trade them for development cards, which have various perks.

There’s one special number that has only one tile it is present on, and that number is seven. Seven is on the desert. “Why would seven be on the desert?” you ask, “You said the desert is useless.” Yes, yes it is, but it’s resource isn’t. When you roll a seven, you get the robber. Instead of everyone getting something useful, you get to take something useful by placing the robber on a tile and stealing one random card from one player that neighbors that resource. That resource is also blocked, so until the robber is moved again no resources will come out of that tile, even if it’s rolled. I may have gotten in trouble once for blocking a tile that all three of my opponents had settlements near, which proceeded to be rolled by each of the three of them, in turn, before the dice got back to me and I rolled another seven. Whoops.

In the end, the game comes down to who gets the most stuff fastest. Settlements, cities, longest road, largest army, extra point cards… you get the idea. If you’d like to read a comedy piece pointing out the logical flaws of Catan, click here. It mentions some more complicated processes, like Universities, which are from the expansions that I don’t think I’ve played, hence I haven’t mentioned them here.

Throwing Killer Baby Dinos!

Well, okay, that’s an unlikely result. But it’s what the friends who introduced us to Evo called it. What is Evo, you ask, besides throwing killer baby dinosaurs? Well, it’s a game of dinosaurs trying to survive and reproduce, in an ever-changing climate with new mutations to match, and the unlivable temperatures of each area necessitating migration, and sometimes a fight, to be able to reproduce, and hopefully survive the “survival phase” better known as the “death phase.”

There are a lot of fun parts to this game, but by far my favorite is the mutation phase, because of all the options. What happens with the climate phase, which comes first, is a new climate is arranged, determining which spots are hot, which are cold, which are instant death, and which are safe. Mutations make it easier to survive with a number of possibilities, like an extra pair of legs for more movement, fur to protect from cold, thermal regulation to protect from heat, extra babies to, well, get extra babies… and the special mutations.

Special mutations are a real treat. I honestly haven’t seen most of them, but there are special mutations for increased attack, increased defense, a ton of other awesome things I don’t remember, and the two from which this game got its nickname, Throwing Killer Baby Dinos. The first is called Hard Shelled, which allows the baby dino to be one space away from the parent, as opposed to next to it (usually babies are born in the tile adjacent to their parent). The other, while I don’t know its official name, is, in essence, Killer Baby Dinos, stating that the baby can be born into a space with an enemy dinosaur. Presumably, a fight ensues, though we didn’t actually get that tile during our round. While getting both special mutations to throw Killer Baby Dinos is unlikely, it’s a fun concept!

Escape Rooms! …Digitally?

Yeah, you read that right. So, as far as I know, I’ve never done a real escape room. I have, however, done plenty of these online ones! A while back I stumbled upon HoodaMath (probably thanks to school friends, but no guarantees on that) and consecutively their entire Escape Games page. My cousins and I obsessed a bit, all three of us hovering around the screen and binge playing them together.

I’m not really going to be comparing this to real escape rooms, since, as I already mentioned, I haven’t really done those. Hence, these will be judged by their own merit and someone else can do a comparison.

There’s always a little bit of plot. Let me start there, because… well, the game starts there. They aren’t just throwing you into the situation; they have a blurb at the beginning explaining why you are where you are and usually some reason for why you can’t get out. You got lost, you stayed too late and the gates are now closed, etc. Not always realistic, but not all of the games are either. Hence, Escape with Hansel and Gretel.

The rest of the game is running around using the green room movement arrows and clicking on things to find clues, helpful objects, and locks of various types that need opening with your smarts and the clues you’ve found (or haven’t yet). They have an impressive variety of things to do and find, and despite the kids’ game animations they’re still difficult for me. In other words, fun!

Eat This!!!

Or, really, please, please don’t. We need that. You know, for the rest of the game. And hopefully the many to come after. Because throwing burritos at your friends is too much fun to pass up.

Throw Throw Burrito items - 2 squishy burritos, a stack of Burrito Bruises, and a Fear Me token

Yes, you read that right. Throwing burritos. Yes, I’m serious. No, are you crazy? Of course they’re not real burritos! Do you know how much of a mess that would make?

Throw Throw Burrito is a fun speed game that involves collecting sets of crazy cards, and sometimes throwing fake burritos at your friends, in a variety of ways. You can duel with one other (like a good old Western back-to-back, walk, turn and draw), battle between just two, or have an all-out war, giving someone else (hopefully) a Burrito Bruise!

But that’s only if you get three cards of that type and color. Otherwise, you’re collecting other types of cards in groups of three, looking to gain points to become the Burrito Master, to be feared by all. There are no turns, just drawing from your deck and discarding on top of someone else’s, and occasionally drawing from the pool decks. So, you know, points for points and burritos because… throwing stress burritos at people is lots of fun? I mean look at those! They’re adorable and squishy and so much fun to peg Mom with. Repeatedly.

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