Bill Abner has noticed a lot of AI blunders in Cyanide’s Blood Bowl which shows just how much more he knows about the game than I do. My solo campaign Elf team is getting hammered, mostly because I’m still getting used to how differently all of the teams play.

Though it looks like a sports game, anyone familiar with Blood Bowl will tell you that that’s only part of the story. Yes, the team management stuff is pretty similar to the sort of thing you’ll find in many sports management games, but the matches themselves are wargames. You have to control the field in enough areas to allow you to move the ball forward to the goal. This means setting up zones of control, getting die rolls in your favor and eliminating your opponent’s most powerful weapons.

Even if the AI is a little clueless, I’m having a great time so far. The color commentary is already repetitive and annoying. The transparency of the die rolls helps you understand the game pretty quickly. Tackle/block zones are clearly marked on screen. The explanations and cues for when you need to make a decision are well written. In fact, Blood Bowl is the very model of a clear board game design.

It should have a tutorial, though, since the manual is pretty brief. Like all board games, it’s best explained by somebody looking over your shoulder, but Cyanide has done a good job of explaining things otherwise. It’s not underdocumented, but it does err on the side of skimpy outside of the rollover and in game text.

More to say on an upcoming podcast and when our Blood Bowl league starts play.

If you want to see extended video of Blood Bowl in action, check out these videos at Frame Rated.

Troy, Tom and Julian look at the year so far and look ahead to see what games they liked and what they are anticipating. Detours into diving, naval warfare and whether Starcraft 2 will appeal to the masses.

Stay tuned to the end for a look at who chose which race for their Dominions 3 multiplayer match and why. (Troy butchers his race name over and over, too. It’s very stupid.)

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Fourmageddon Map for Dominions 3
Tom comments on Starcraft’s single player plans
Bill Abner’s “Blood Bowl” Blog
Troy’s Half Year Round Up

When Brian Reynolds gets hired by the biggest social gaming company in America, either he’s selling out to the one part of the game business that is rapidly expanding or Social Games are about to get a lot more interesting.

Here’s hoping it’s the latter.

What the press release doesn’t say is that the new Zynga studio is made up almost entirely of Big Huge Games refugees.

I’m laying the groundwork for a feature story on where social gaming fits into the gaming world as we understand it, so drop me a line if you play a lot of these things. Do not invite me to play Mafia Wars.

Yeah, it will take forever to finish a game, but still looking forward to it.

Six months in and 2009 already has some strong contenders for best strategy game of the year. In all, it’s been a strong half year with a few surprises. But, with the caveat that I have not played a final buld Blood Bowl yet, I still had no trouble coming up with the three best strategy titles so far.

3) The Sims 3: The best selling PC game of the year shows why Will Wright’s formula of interactive people and amateur soap opera hijinks is a landmark game design achievements. The new version adds a town you can roam around in and puts less emphasis on bladder management so you can focus on higher RPG game mechanics. Like fishing. The addition of “moodlets” (buffs and curses) means that there is no mystery about why your Sim is happy and lets you plan trade offs to make that miserable toy person life a little less miserable. It is a sophisticated time management game that challenges both your story telling and resource harvesting skills. Gather friends! Gather influence! Gather children! And try not to go crazy doing it.

2) Demigod: You could be pardoned for not tuning in to Demigod after the rough multiplayer launch. Discounts and coupon offers have kept the game a going concern, though, and I’m thrilled because it deserves a second look. Like The Sims, this is RPG as much as RTS and it has more character and style than any other game this year. Lots of great action and artistry, but the heart of the game is the sequence of one upmanship – tactics and counter tactics and counters to those. If Gas Powered Games stays true to its promise of regular map and demigod updates, there’s a chance this game could climb higher by the end of the year.

1) Warhammer Dawn of War II: I was probably a little hard on the campaign game when I played it. All scripted missions, which is a little blah, but they do a better than normal job of teaching you the rudiments of strategy (for one faction at least) while giving you a nice variety of challenges. Relic has once again established that they are the masters of skirmish and MP design, with four different but similar factions. Of course, they haven’t broken it with patches yet. The secret to their success, I think, is that they understand the difference between epic experiences and epic-ness. I wrote before about how Epic has become a synonym for Big, when in fact Epics are usual personal stories. The small unit count of Relic’s recent RTSes means that every soldier can be a hero; there is an Achilles in all of us, I suppose.

Other things of note in 2009:

Clearly the biggest change has been the podcast. My original plan for Three Moves Ahead was to do it every few weeks, because I wasn’t convinced that I could persuade people to talk to me every week about strategy games. Tom Chick told me that was a stupid idea, so here we are – a weekly podcast drawing 1500 listeners a week and climbing. Spread the word, review and rate us on iTunes and stay tuned for a summer full of guests and interesting topics. Many developers and publisher have been helpful with review copies and beta code, and I hope that wider exposure means that we can cover other stuff in more detail. It’s really hard finding games we all have played. But thanks to Tom, Bruce and Julian for making my Sunday/Monday nights so much fun.

You may have noticed that I’ve done less review work this year. Partly that’s because of some site’s changes in emphases, competition with other writers for scarce money and space and my reluctance to work for very little. Time has also been an issue, since the book/film column at Crispy Gamer can take quite a bit of time if I’m doing it right. Still, I do hope to get more review work in the next six months or at least review more here. I do think I know what I’m doing in this business…

Coming soon, what to look for in the next six months. It could become a very busy year.

Slitherine Studios was born as a computer game company formed by two miniature wargamers (they played miniature wargames, I mean. They aren’t especially small.) A couple of years ago they took a break from computer game development to co-publish a new rule set for ancients miniatures. The Field of Glory: Ancient and Medieval Wargaming Rules
rules were designed to be an alternative to the simpler DBA rules, and were in many ways a step towards complexity in a hobby that had moved more toward the abstract.

Now they are doing a computer version of Fields of Glory. Zama, the final battle of the Punic War, is taken as the starting point and there are 11 other battles ranging up to the war against the British rebel Boudicca. There will be a scenario builder and, in later releases, other armies and an army builder. Which is great because as it stands there are no Greek armies, so Pydna and Cynocephalae are out.

Judging from the screenshots, it’s looking pretty rough, but there’s a chance this could be the EoW: Ancient Battles spiritual successor that I’ve been waiting for. DBA never made the jump to the PC world except for DBAOnline, a multiplayer only experience that, at least, has a comprehensive army list.

In spite of the enduring appeal of miniatures for a small wargaming (and Warhammer) community, few computer game developers have really tried to tap into that submarket. The Tin Soldiers series copied the look, if not purely the play, of miniatures gaming and the Dawn of War RTSes are probably more thrilling than most WH40K tabletop experiences.

This is a very marginal product by any definition. But I am looking forward to it. I, too, am a marginal product.

E3 kind of screwed with the usual publishing schedule, so my Print Screen column is up now – a few weeks later than usual. Plus had some back and forth with my Crispy Gamer editors because the book was a pain in the ass to really make comfortable to most readers.

Read here for some blather about Miguel Sicart’s Ethics of Computer Games.

This week, the panel takes the pulse of strategy franchises. What makes you strong? What makes you weak? And is any particular franchise in trouble?

We also give you a preview of our next epic multiplayer gaming experience. Will Tom and Julian redeem themselves after such a terrible showing last time? Not with this game.

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Give Tom Chick credit. He’s not afraid to ask the obvious question that puts people on the spot.

Okay, well let me ask you about another tricky issue. Something that I think is conspicuously absent from The Sims is something very important in many people’s day-to-day lives. That’s religion. How come the Sims has never incorporated that?

Now MJ Chun is no knucklehead. The best response is to stall for a bit, resisting the implication that The Sims is inherently materialistic. She sticks to the mantra that The Sims is, in fact, about making people comfortable with the stories they can tell. Religion, she suggests, is akin to clothing. Why penalize or reward people for specific accessories if they don’t match up with what the player wants to tell?

For us, because it’s such a storytelling game, one of the things we don’t want to do is make judgments. The danger of making a game that is international, that crosses so many ages, is that tagging clothing a particular way is a slippery slope in terms of making judgments. If you give the long flowing dress a moodlet because you’re more attractive, then somebody would wonder “Why not the pantsuit?” It limits players’ storytelling ability. I think it’s the same deal with religion. It’s a game for everyone. It’s like public schools. Public schools are for everyone. We don’t want to impose on anyone’s storytelling. We don’t want to make a judgment on anyone’s particular way of seeing the world. This is your game, your story. If the player decides that they’re going to tell a story of a particular sim and religion happens to be a part of it, that’s the story they’re telling. But we’re never going to insert that into their gameplay.

So, we want you to tell stories so long as those stories don’t suggest that faith is central to your self-perception. We’ll have hedonists and mad scientists. but no televangelists or quiet workers for God.

And I would be fine with that. Except for the fact they have ghosts. Another artifact of faith that may seem like fun and games for most people but, in a simulation game full of love and trust and pathos and the like, I don’t like the idea of coming face to face with the idea that my life is so important that I may never die. That my loved ones may never die. That life is, in fact, a game. I, as a Christian gamer, have to accept that ghosts exist but cannot have a spiritual outlet that rewards me for, say, being kind to the poor or donating old things or resisting the temptations of Bella Goth (or whomever this year’s Bella Goth is.) I have to accept the spiritual woo-woo nonsense – it’s built into the game.

I appreciate that religion is a messy, messy topic for game developers. And I appreciate that a one size fits all approach to religion might be worse. I am in no way advocating that religion be as constant a presence in my Sims’ lives as the broken tub is.

But don’t pretend that this is about story telling. My Sims resist me constantly. They want kids even if I know that it’s a bad financial decision at this point. They want a new computer while the Apple II equivalent is more than sufficient. They think about the hot barista when everyone knows the city councilwoman is a better choice.

In short, the stories I tell are often circumscribed by the collection of traits I choose and the early friendships my Sim makes. Some stories are just ones that EA/Maxis either do not want people to tell. Some terrible, terrible things could happen to their story telling forum if they became avenues for religious wars.

But why not add some spiritual element somewhere? Some way that certain traits lead to rewards for being a nice person – where altruism is as powerful as the selfishness that drives so much Sim behavior. The assumption that a Sim religion means a church or an exclusive club is a generational one, I fear, one that somehow skipped me in rural New Brunswick, where religion meant generosity and kindness and openness and hating gay people.

That last one has, thankfully, changed. Sometimes generational attitudes gain on your elders.

But look at the Sims trait list. No altruistic only ambitious. No kind hearted, but there is mean spirited. No generous, but there is mooch. Hopeless romantic, but no celibate. All the best virtues are lumped into one large “Friendly” category that is used to force you to make your Sim accumulate friends. The “Good” trait is the catch all for the Christian virtues we’ve been raised one. Not that the traits are everything, but they do – in general – point toward characteristics that are about gathering, collecting and self-improvement. They are a representation of how the game sees story telling.

Once again, this is a design decision that I can live with, but I would appreciate it if EA/Maxis would just be up front and say that this is not about freedom of story telling but about limiting uncomfortable story telling. Chun praises (rightfully) the endlessly linked Alice and Kevin story (Born on Quartertothree.com, mentioned in our podcast and sent to me enough times to realize that many of my friends don’t pay attention.) Part of that story’s beauty is how uncomfortable it is, how this poor girl makes us feel for and think about girls like her.

Why deprive the religious of this powerful story telling tool?

(Please keep the comments civil. I know I can trust you guys, but religion pisses people off.)

Since we devoted an entire podcast to collectible card games and one of the highlights was a fight between Tom and Julian over why Magic sucks, I really should be playing the new 360 version.

Or maybe not. Over at GWJ, Julian Murdoch writes about why the game is addictive but not quite fulfilling. Punch line:

By simplifying the game so much, I find myself yearning for the “real” experience of Magic: customizing decks to min-max my way to cheap victory. Deck customization in Duels is anemic, consisting only of adding more cards to basic decks, with no ability to fine-tune the distribution or remove ineffective cards.