The Ties That Bind by Walter M. Miller

Buds, Blooms, And Thorns Review Of Wooly Whammoth By Smirk & Dagger Games

Buds, Blooms, and Thorns Review of Wooly Whammoth by Smirk & Dagger Games
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Vitals:
Title: Wooly Whammoth
Designed by: Nicholas Cravotta, Rebecca Bleau
Publisher: Smirk & Dagger Games
MSRP: $40
2-4p | 20-30 min | 8+

Introduction:

If you were a member of a prehistoric tribe, you'd need to eat.  And what better to eat than big, yummy, mammoths?  They're big though, so hunting them is difficult... Unless you can drive them off a cliff and let gravity do the work for you!  The problem is, mammoths are often unpredictable and dangerous.  Sometimes they'll charge, sometimes they'll even take you off the cliff with them!

In Wooly Whammoth all players are controlling their own tribe, trying to drive a mammoth off a cliff in order to feed their tribe.  Simultaneously, everyone will play a card that says what will happen that round, either movement cards or charge cards.  The catch is that everyone's cards are combined to decide what happens!  So if too many people play movement cards you may end up running off the cliff with the mammoth!  Or if someone plays a Charge card you may end up getting trampled!  Whoever manages to collect enough food at the end of the game, without losing their entire tribe, is the winner!

Blooms:
Blooms are the game's highlights and features.  Elements that are exceptional.

• Excellent components!  The artwork is fun and whimsical, the double layered, sliding tracks for each player are nice and thick, and all the tokens and cards are top notch quality.

Buds:
Buds are interesting parts of the game I would like to explore more. 

• This needs to be played with the right group of people.  If everyone plays conservatively it'll be a boring game, but when people take chances it can cause some crazy fun.
• Light, quick play and a whimsical theme make for a good filler.

Thorns:
Thorns are a game's shortcomings and any issues I feel are noteworthy.

• Gameplay is very light and casual.  It feels like a mismatch with the $40 price tag.
• If you don't play with people that like a little chaos the game will be pretty boring.  In my first game I played with a group that was very calculating (they mostly play euro strategy games).  Because of this everyone calculated what the best moves would be and everyone ended up in pretty much the same place for much of the game.  You really need either a completely random element, or someone who loves instigating chaos to make the game exciting.
• This is a game that really focuses on take-that mechanics.  There is bluffing and a bit of deduction, but it all revolves around trying to get your opponents to either fall off the cliff or get trampled.  If you aren't into a game built around this goal, as most of my game group isn't, then this game isn't for you.

Final Thoughts:

This is a game that I thought would be more fun than it was.  Part of that is because it's not the right game for my gaming group though.  Wooly Whammoth is really all about trying to see if you can get your opponents to destroy themselves.  A lot of Smirk & Dagger games have strong take-that elements to them and Wooly Whammoth is no exception. 

There are some interesting bluffing opportunities and mechanic interactions in the game though.  You do have to think about, and then second guess, what you think your opponents are going to play in order to keep yourself both on the cliff and avoid being trampled.  Each tribe has a unique ability that can help them in the game, and there are some cards that let you do things other than move that add some interesting options.  However, after all was said and done, I didn't feel like much really happened in the game.  There were no overly exciting moments, no sense of danger or thrill of the hunt.  I'd love to see more "last minute" save types of occasions in the game to bring forward the sense of hunting a dangerous prey.  I think part of the issue is that cards are resolved sequentially rather than simultaneously.  So you are able to move and drive a mammoth off the cliff before a Charge card takes effect.  If you've already driven your mammoth off the cliff it can't charge.  Because of this, we felt that the Charge cards were less effective than we'd have liked.  They were potentially mean, but in actuality, didn't seem mean enough.  Simultaneously charging and moving would probably result in more casualties in the game, so tribes may have to be bigger, but I think it would also add more excitement.

Wooly Whammoth reminded me a lot of Get Bit, but much less elegant.  The experience in Get Bit is very similar - players are trying to avoid getting eaten by a shark by playing numerical cards that determine their sequence in line, but it's also simpler.  I think Get Bit works much better for the experience the games are trying to instill, plus Get Bit is a fraction of the cost.

Anyway, I gave Wooly Whammoth a Thorn rating because it really wasn't right for my group, and I think it fell short of the experience it tried to present.  If you like simple bluffing and take-that games you may get more mileage from the game.  Thematically it's wonderful and would make a great family game, but mechanically I felt it left a bit to be desired.

Buds, Blooms, and Thorns Rating:

Thorn!  I can't quite recommend this game,
although you may enjoy it if you like games
like this.  I feel this game has some flaws and
there are areas that it could improve in the
experience it provides.

Pictures:

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GJJ Games Reviews are independent, unpaid reviews of games I, George Jaros, have played with my family and friends.  Some of these games I own, some are owned by friends, some are borrowed, and some were provided by a publisher or designer for my honest feedback and evaluation.  I make every attempt to be both honest and constructively critical in my reviews, and they are all my opinions.  There are four types of reviews on GJJ Games: Full Reviews feature critical reviews based on a rubric and games receive a rating from 0 to 100.  Quick Reviews and Kickstarter Previews are either shorter reviews of published games or detailed preview reviews of crowdfunding games that will receive a rating from 0 to 10 based on my impressions of the game.  Buds, Blooms,and Thorns reviews are shorter reviews of either published or upcoming games that highlight three aspects of a game: Buds are parts of a game I look forward to exploring more, Blooms are outstanding features of a game, and Thorns are shortcomings of a game.  Each BBT review game will receive an overall rating of Thorn, Bud, or Bloom.

Episode 19: Top Faves With Dave Goes To The Library Is Live!

Episode 19: Top Faves with Dave goes to the Library.

https://soundcloud.com/user-989538417/episode-19-top-faves-with-dave-goes-to-the-library

We talk with Dave Tubbs about what novels inspire us to game.

The Veteran Wargamer is brought to you by King's Hobbies and Games.

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Other companies we mentioned:
Sharpe's Rifles
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The Killer Angels
Regimental Fire and Fury
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PicoArmor ACW
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The Hobbit
GW LOTR/Hobbit
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Song of Blades and Heroes
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Frostgrave
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Iron Guard
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Fifteen Hours

Warhammer 40,000
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Honor Harrington

Full Thrust
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Ad Astra Games Miniatures
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For Whom the Bell Tolls

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Eisenhorn Triology
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Shadow War Armageddon
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Team Yankee
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GHQ
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Ronin
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Pike and Shotte
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Warlord Landsknechts
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Hammer's Slammers

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15mm Slammers vehicles
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Dirtside
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War and Peace

Among the Thugs
Blood Bowl
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Conan

Conan Adventure Game
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Copplestone 15mm Barbarians
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Grenadier/Mirliton Barbarians
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Music courtesy bensound.com. Recorded with zencastr.com. Edited with Audacity. Make your town beautiful; get a haircut.

DevCorner: FreeDink Sound Design Replacements

FreeDink is older than some kids that downloaded open source games on their own by now. The two main cornerstones of the game are: low resolution, twisted humor. One really cool thing about FreeDink is that you can play it in a browser.

Anyway, I worked on replacing some sounds years ago and just recently the same bug bit me again and I made replacements for all sounds that didn't have free versions of themselves yet.

For creation, I remixed a *lot* of freesound.org sounds and uploaded all the remixes right back there. The attribution feature of Freesound is quite cool, especially if very different sounds are made (see screenshot above).

However, I underestimated how much effort it takes to test them and to give some clarity to myself as well as share the process with the world, I made a video showing the steps taken for testing sounds:

I could not have done it without the excellent documentation and progress report.

I will continue testing and hopefully, soon all the audio will be fully free on this um... cult classic™!

Dev's Corner is a featured article series focusing on tutorials and tips for game developers operating on a Libre Software environment.

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

Need For Speed Games Part 4: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, Need For Speed: Underground

Today on Super Adventures, I've reached the end of the first decade of the Need for Speed games. We're in the EA GAMES TRAX era now, where every time a new song comes on, the TRAX box slides onto the screen to let you know who you're listening to. Even on the title screen.

This also means we're in the licenced soundtrack era, and the sixth gen console era! And Underground brings us to the era of perpetual twilight, where daytime is banned. Unless it's literally set underground, I don't think they ever say.

Anyway this is it, the last part. After this you won't be reading about any racing games here for a long long time, so enjoy it while it lasts (or endure it for just a little longer). Earlier parts are here, here and here.

(If I don't mention what system a screenshot came from, it's from the PC version.)

Read on »

And I'm Still Losing...

What's going on everyone!?

Today for the #2019gameaday challenge my lovely wife, beautiful daughter and I played a game of Hero Realms with the Wizard, Thief and Ranger expansions. 

Unfortunately, I still cant post pictures unless they're screenshots because there is an error with the blogger app but rest assured I really did lose, lol!

Trinity ended up killing me and doing a great job as usual but this time Sam ended up finishing her off before she could regain any health and take her mother out as well.

As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)

-Tim

Pocket PC - The Forgotten Era Of Handheld Video Gaming?

Fr Mark Higgins writes- 

Back in the early 2000s I was an owner of a Pocket PC, I managed to persuade my grandparents to buy me one when I was about 16, I owned, to begin with an HP Jornada 525, later on I had a NEC Pocket Gear 2060, then I had an Axim X5, before finally settling with an HP IPAQ 2495, this probably spans the years of 2002 to 2007, so that's a lot of devices in a short space of time.

Anyway, the reason I had so many of these things was because as a 16 or 17 year old I managed to find my way into reviewing games for Pocket PCs at a website now long defunct called PDArcade.com, in fact, eventually I more or less ran the news side of the site by the time I was 20. The site was pretty popular back in the day and we made a lot through ad revenues and I got a share of the pot.

Anyway, sites like PDArcade existed because PDAs were a major platform, albeit a niche one, for video games. There were other websites dedicated to PDA gaming reviews such as pocketgamer.org, forums dedicated to discussing Pocket PC gaming like, if I recall, pocketmatrix.com, and even Pocket PCs particularly marketed as gaming Pocket PCs, such as, I think some of the ASUS models. Peripherals existed like control pads to make gaming even easier.

And then, of course, there were software companies, often producing really, really impressive titles. PDA gaming, developer side of things, was a return to the days of 8-bit because games, that were selling 10000s of copies were being made by tiny teams of programmers. PDA game development also was a work of real creativity because often Pocket PCs did not have that much storage space. Some companies really excelled at being able to produce games that looked amazing, perhaps at times reaching close to game boy advance and they did so without the size of game going beyond 20mb.

 There was also a thriving emulation scene and at the end of its era the top Pocket PCs were able to play, without problems, all 8 bit, 16 bit and even 32 bit systems- that's quite something, considering that we are talking 2007 being able to play PS1 games released only 5 years previously- it would be like today playing a PS3 game on an iPhone using the hardware of the iPhone.

Perhaps if there is interest I will post some more on this subject, because I might well be one of the closet experts out there on it. I must have reviewed close to a hundred games for Pocket PC and played even more. The pictures in this article give you an idea of the kind of thing you could find on Pocket PC. 

Prices varied and top rate games reached up to $30 I think, but generally a top tier title would be something like $14.99. The place to buy games were the now defunct websites handango.com pocketgear.com and of course directly from the developers. Usually you bought the game on PC and then transferred it over to your PDA but it was technically possible to to everything from the PDA. 

There was a lot of innovation, creativity and excellence in the short lived Pocket PC gaming system. Of course there were ports and a lot of the pictures show this, but alongside ports, developers pushed the limits of the system. Some memorable and excellent companies producing high quality were Hexacto, Ziosoft, PDAmill, Momentum games, Crimson fire, eSoft Interactive and many more.

Brave Browser voted the best privacy-focused product of 2020

Out of all the privacy-focused products and apps available on the market, Brave has been voted the best. Other winners of Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards showed that there was a huge interest in privacy-enhancing products and apps such as chats, maps, and other collaboration tools.

An extremely productive year for Brave

Last year has been a pivotal one for the crypto industry, but few companies managed to see the kind of success Brave did. Almost every day of the year has been packed witch action, as the company managed to officially launch its browser, get its Basic Attention Token out, and onboard hundreds of thousands of verified publishers on its rewards platform.

Luckily, the effort Brave has been putting into its product hasn't gone unnoticed.

The company's revolutionary browser has been voted the best privacy-focused product of 2019, for which it received a Golden Kitty award. The awards, hosted by Product Hunt, were given to the most popular products across 23 different product categories.

Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt said:

"Our annual Golden Kitty awards celebrate all the great products that makers have launched throughout the year"

Brave's win is important for the company—with this year seeing the most user votes ever, it's a clear indicator of the browser's rapidly rising popularity.

Privacy and blockchain are the strongest forces in tech right now

If reaching 10 million monthly active users in December was Brave's crown achievement, then the Product Hunt award was the cherry on top.

The recognition Brave got from Product Hunt users shows that a market for privacy-focused apps is thriving. All of the apps and products that got a Golden Kitty award from Product Hunt users focused heavily on data protection. Everything from automatic investment apps and remote collaboration tools to smart home products emphasized their privacy.

AI and machine learning rose as another note-worthy trend, but blockchain seemed to be the most dominating force in app development. Blockchain-based messaging apps and maps were hugely popular with Product Hunt users, who seem to value innovation and security.

For those users, Brave is a perfect platform. The company's research and development team has recently debuted its privacy-preserving distributed VPN, which could potentially bring even more security to the user than its already existing Tor extension.

Brave's effort to revolutionize the advertising industry has also been recognized by some of the biggest names in publishing—major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, NDTV, NPR, and Qz have all joined the platform. Some of the highest-ranking websites in the world, including Wikipedia, WikiHow, Vimeo, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo, are also among Brave's 390,000 verified publishers.

Earn Basic Attention Token (BAT) with Brave Web Browser

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