Bryan Stout wrote: > How is it going for the rest of you? We need to wrap this up soon: we want > to do a second pass on the games with other judges, and come up with a list > of finalists at least 2 weeks before Origins, which would be June 9. > > Thanks to Erik Wald for signing up for the remaining unclaimed games. No problem. With just four unclaimed at the time, it worked well. 3-High: The cooperative aspect really appealed to my playtesters. There's a significant luck aspect involved in whether you win or lose, but the game was fun each way. The subtraction aspect seemed a bit confusing at first, but quickly became natural. I could see it as a way to help children learn subtraction, while still being fun for the parents. Fortunately, applicability to its original competition doesn't matter for this award. Ascendancy: As a beginner's introduction to IceTowers, it works. However, the luck aspect ends up overwhelming the play. In our tests, the last player won huge every time. Capture the Flag: As a two-player game, it's a great chess variant; not quite as deep, but quicker to complete. The real surprise is that the drones are your most important piece, with their ability to jump over removed spaces. That leaves the queens prone to getting trapped, and the pawns almost useless except as decoys. It probably helped that I have a full hex board to place the chips on, leaving the lines across missing spaces easily visible. The three-player variant seems prone to kingmaker problems, though. CoverFire: Almost unplayable as written. The biggest thing it needs is a list of possible commands; the examples feel incomplete, particularly with other pictures seeming to display commands that aren't described. Beyond that, the order input mechanic is left to be inferred; it isn't even described well on other Node Wars pages. I'm assuming that we're allowed to hide our inputs from the opponent, to be revealed together, but that's just from familiarity with non-pyramid simultaneous turn games. In my opinion, 3-High and Capture the Flag are worth further evaluation. Ascendancy is worth playing, but more as an introduction to other games than on its own merits, so it probably isn't a great fit for a "Best of 2009" award. CoverFire could have been a contender if it were finished. - Eric