Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] IGDC Spring 2009 Results!

  • FromDoug Orleans <dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 26 May 2009 17:24:53 -0400
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 3:48 PM, David Artman <david.artman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> NOW: I am going to copy the comments in the emails (anonymously) to the wiki
> pages  and do IGDC Post-Comp Procedures. If you'd like to own up to your
> comments, or expand upon them, just sign in to the wiki and go sign/expand
> them! The designers, I am sure, will appreciate your input!

I'm going to re-post my comments here because I didn't really write
them to be standalone game-specific comments.

Yes, these are on a 1-10 scale; I used the BGG absolute scale, and I
just didn't like any of them more than a 5.  Specific comments below.

3 High: 4
Apophis: 4
Diamond Mine: 3
Landing Zone: 5
Who Made The Team: 5

3 High and Apophis both work fine, but I just don't like cooperative
games.  Apophis was somewhat more interesting, game-wise, which might
have been worth a half-point, but I also don't like realtime games so
that bumped it back down to 4.  I kind of expect Apophis to win the
competition, because it's a pretty solid design, but it's just not my
kind of game.

Diamond Mine sounded promising, but fell totally flat with two
players.  There didn't seem to be any reason not to place the mines on
the squares closest to your quadrant, nor any reason not to take both
diamonds from each mine you visit even if they weren't your color.
Which means it degenerated to pure luck, the winner being the one who
happened to randomly placed more of their own color.  I would have
liked to play this with 4 players, but I didn't get a chance; I can
see how it might be better, since every placement would be in
someone's quadrant, and there would be more bumping other players
during the movement, but I can also see how it might still be too
random to be worthwhile.  Sorry for not making more of an effort to
find opponents.

Landing Zone is a perfectly reasonable dexterity game.  I'm not sure
there's much accuracy to be had in flicking trees, but perhaps with
more practice you could develop some skill.  Again, not really my kind
of game, but it's short and not totally trivial (unlike, say,
Moonshot), so it gets a higher rating than the coop games.

Who Made The Team has atrociously written rules, and I'm tempted to
just give it a 1 based on that, since we did not actually manage to
play the game due to rules questions.  But I have since figured out
what the rules were probably meant to be, and it seems like a
perfectly reasonable (if somewhat convoluted) two-player abstract
strategy game.  I suspect there would be strong kingmaker issues with
more than two players, though.  The solitaire game is an interesting
little puzzle; the best I can do is 6 points, but I haven't tried very
hard.  I suspect it's not a very deep puzzle, though, and probably
easily solvable.  Anyway, with a total rules rewrite, I could see this
being a 6 or maybe even a 7, but as it is I'm being somewhat generous
with a 5.

--Doug Orleans
dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx