1/13/14

Today, two game developers came in and talked to us. I played one of their games, Digger's Garden Match, and also got part way through a game of Puerto Rico.

Digger's Garden Match

Match is a simple kids game designed to teach geometry, shapes, colors, and pattern recognition. The game is composed of players placing down hexes which have 6 triangles, each triangle having a shape, a number of shapes and a color. Players match shape or color, scoring points for the matched symbols. The game ends when the hexes run out, and the winner is the one with the most points.

The matching was simple enough, and I think kids would love the game. Everything made sense, but I think it was a little too simple for most of the students liking. It was still competitive, and we worked together, to some extent, noticing various aspects of our particular game together.

In conclusion, a fun game, for maybe a couple times. Much better for young kids, I'd imagine.

Puerto Rico
For a while, Puerto Rico was my families favorite game. Even though I know a lot about it, I still learned a new rule about it last night. Players choose roles in order to gain, sell, and ship away goods, build buildings, acquire colonists, and build up production. Shipping away goods and building buildings gives a player victory points. The player with the most victory points at the end of the game achieves victory.

The rules of Puerto Rico are very complex. For most people, it takes a game or two just to understand the rules, a few more to develop a basic strategy, and then a few more to discover how to effectively carry out this strategy. Once you understand the rules, the game becomes simpler, and you don't have to worry about missing one rule that ruins your strategy.

The game mechanics make timing extremely crucial. Most of the player interaction comes in the form of role choosing. When one player chooses a role, all players take the same action; but the role chooser gets a privilege. So each player is always trying to make sure they have the right resources at the right time. The best role a player can generally take is a role in which their action is meaningful, and the other players' actions are meaningless.

This precise timing creates passive cutthroat games. There are very few active attacks on other players, but if things go the wrong order for a player, they can end up wasting a lot of time. Doing this to your opponents is a large part of the game. But the strategy in timing is fun, there are many interesting strategies and nobody usually gets too upset.

Another aspect of the roles is that everyone is doing stuff very frequently. No one has wait long periods of time if the game isn't going their way. Puerto Rico is a very engaging game.

In conclusion, Puerto Rico takes a bit of getting used to, and can be cutthroat, but has fun strategy, and is engaging. A fun game.