Games, Games, Games, Games!

• A great iPhone board game that isn’t Attax!
• Can you and your friends survive an hour on a tiny sinking cardboard submarine that’s running out of air and vodka?
• New developments with the coolest deck of cards no one’s heard of!
• And the return of Rogue, last seen (by me) on a VAX 11/750!

Hexy

I’m happy to say there’s now an excellent implementation of Hex for the iPhone, named Hexy. I’m sure my recent call for more diversity in iPhone board games was entirely responsible for this, even though the authors claim it’s been in development for months.

Hex dates from the 1940s. Two players alternate playing stones on a diamond-shaped grid of hexagons; one is trying to build a connection between the left and right edges, the other between the top and bottom. That’s it. Despite the trivial rules, the gameplay is fun and interesting. You’ll quickly discover basic principles like “bridges” and “ladders”, but there’s a lot more strategy to learn.

(An interesting factoid about Hex is that it was proved early on that there is an infallible winning strategy for the first player; but the proof says nothing about what that strategy is! Small board sizes have been solved, but at the sizes that people typically play, starting at 11×11, no sure-fire strategy is known, so the game is still interesting to play.)

Hexy lets you play solo against an AI, or against another human either on the same iPhone or over a local network. I’ve played three games against the AI, and won two; as I’m a rank novice, this indicates the AI may not be that strong. On the other hand, it was nice not to be crushed like a bug! And I haven’t tried the larger boards, which are supposed to be more difficult.

The presentation is quite elegant. The graphics are subtle but pretty, with a very legible board, and some subliminal translucent hexagons floating by behind it. But every once in a while a cartoon bee flies by, which I find sort of distracting. My only real wish is that the board could be rotated slightly so it would fit better onto the iPhone screen, making scrolling or zooming less necessary.

Hexy costs $3.99, which is a bit more than many iPhone games, but if you’ve already got an Attax game, and are bored of checkers and tic-tac-toe, I think it’s one of your best options for another solid strategy game.

Red November

Board games have common, overused themes, just like their video cousins. There are any number of games about ancient Egypt, about Renaissance Italian merchants, about railroads or zombies or space empires. Some of these are excellent games, but it gets to the point where you wish designers would show more originality.

Bruno Faidutti had the highly original, if macabre, idea of making a board game based on the Kursk disaster, in which a Russian nuclear submarine sank to the bottom of the sea after an onboard explosion, and the whole crew died before rescuers could arrive. It would be a cooperative game, where the players work together to repair damage, put out fires, and try to stay alive for a specified number of turns.

Unfortunately, all the publishers he showed his prototype to turned it down, saying the theme was too depressing. (Frankly, I agree.) So in another brilliant move, he re-spun it slightly: the game, retitled Red November (BGG), is now about Soviet gnomes. Alcoholic Soviet gnomes, who need a shot of vodka to fortify themselves to attack leaks or fires, but then need to make saving rolls against passing out on the floor. Plus, an added hazard is a giant Kraken that must be shot from outside the submarine (good luck finding the aqualung.)

It’s actually a lot of fun. The silliness (which is reflected in the artwork) keeps you from thinking about “Das Boot” so much; even my kids are fine with it. The game keeps on throwing new randomized emergencies at you every turn, as rooms catch fire or flood, hatches jam, and the reactor overheats. There’s a very interesting time-keeping mechanism that allows the characters to run around ‘simultaneously’, fixing the problems, though the players are really still taking turns. We’ve won both games we’ve played—i.e. we survived till the end of the time track—though I did tweak a few rules to make things a bit easier for us, to avoid turning the kids against the game ;-)

The game is pretty cheap (around $20), and comes in a small box the size of a fat paperback, which is impressively densely packed with bits. Getting the box shut again after a game is a strategic exercise in itself! The rules are medium in complexity—more than Monopoly, but less than D&D. My kids and I found it easy to pick up the basics, but there are some details, like the specific effects of flooded rooms, that take some memorization. All in all, it’s one of the best board games I’ve bought in a while, definitely recommended (for the non-claustrophobic.)

Decktet News

The Decktet is this new deck of cards I first wrote about a few months ago while I was making my own copy. It combines an interesting new mechanic (multiple suits per card) that’s fertile ground for designing games, and whimsical but enigmatic illustrations that have a Tarot-like symbolism.

Since then,

• Its designer, P.D. Magnus, has added four new optional cards that have three suits each (I like them but haven’t yet printed out copies to add to my deck).
• A limited number of professionally-printed decks are available for sale for $15 postpaid.
• There’s now an official Decktet wiki. It includes rules for the existing games, as well as for games still being designed, and has a discussion forum.
• I’ve written down preliminary, partial rules for a game I’m designing, under the working title “Epic”. Its goal is to make use of the allegorical meanings of the cards, by having the gameplay represent a fantasy adventure or quest.

Rogue for iPhone

Finally: Rogue. For. iPhone. Dude! This game ruled my 1982 (along with Tutankham).