Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Game designers

Viktory 2 is a game of world conquest with concepts that seem inspired by Settlers of Catan.
1. Do you enjoy "conquer the world" wargames like Risk 2210, Axis & Allies, Attack!, & Memoir '44?
2. Do you enjoy games with an element of chance, i.e. dice rolling to resolve combat?
3. Do you think it is okay to sacrifice some realism for increased simplicity of play?
4. Do you prefer fast paced games that can be finished in a few hours or less?
5. Do you prefer games where an aggressive strategy is not penalized?
6. Do you prefer games that have miniatures as opposed to chits?
7. Do you prefer games with customizable maps for greater replayability?
8. Do you prefer games that don't involve a ton of number crunching and complex rules?
9. Do you prefer games that a beginner can understand easily?

If you've answered "YES" to most of the above questions, then VIKTORY II is a game you should strongly consider.

The story of the making of Viktory II. I am fascinated by the dedication and process of making boardgames. I have made some card games and wish to make up new rules using my Sid Meier's Civilization the Board game set. This person lives up in East Texas and I hope makes it down for OwlCon.

Here is someone writing about the long process of producing his game 6 billion - the human conquest of the solar system. There was some debate about the underlying premises of the game. The game possibly could be converted to a spreadsheet like the Puerto Rico spreadsheet editions.

Here is a list of games that would be helped by spreadsheets. I would like to modernize Concensus and put it on one.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Wired News: The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer

Is Clive Thompson a game wuss or does the gaming community split into hard-core and soft-core by how long you can play a game straight?
�» Anti-spyware spread by spyware

Recently a trojan that promotes anti-spyware and anti-virus programs showed up on my system. Neither AVG, Spybot S&D or Ad-Aware could find it. Finally, I downloaded a specific free trojan remover based on one message I got that seems to have taken care of it. AVG did discover a separate Trojan-downloader the next day.

I suspect the first trojan may have snuck in with one of these free recent game downloads I blogged about so a note of caution is in order.