Games evening: jenga blokus and dominion prosperity

Jenga Blokus

Douglas invents Blokus Jenga. The two halves complement each other amazingly well. Basically, you remove a wooden piece from a tower according to the rules of Jenga, and then put it onto squares of a go board (either flat 2x5, on side 1x5, or on end 2x1) according to the rules of blockus. Each piece you place is your colour (use little coloured cubes/counters on them, it's easy to see.)

When the tower collapses, the last player to touch it removes one of the culprit's pieces from the game board and the tower is rebuilt. When everyone passes or you run out of pieces, the player with the most squares covered wins.

The tension between simply taking pieces and placing them on the game board as best you can, and of adjusting the risks you take according to the position on the game board, is really natural.

Dominion Prosperity

This reinforces my impression that I'm really bad at it, but it's really fun.

Solium Infernum

http://www.crypticcomet.com/games/SI/Solium_Infernum.html

I've been playing Solium Infernum. I was first linked by pjc(?) to the awesome write-ups on Rock-Paper-Shotgun diarying several players progress through the multiplayer game, and the growing tensions between them.

You play a noble of hell, scheming to replace Satan as the new lord of the pit. You manoeuvre to expand your lands, but the winning is determined not by territory but by prestige, which is given from controlling certain places of power, but also by making successful vendettas, successfully insulting rivals in parliament, etc, etc.

What I find exceptionally cute (and by "cute" I mean baroque and infernal) is that you obviously can't just out and start a vendetta against another fiend. Oh no, of course not. First you have to justify it by making unreasonable demands or insulting them in public (wagering prestige depending whether they cave in like a whiny little baby fiend, or indignantly refuse), and use that as an excuse to execute a vendetta -- little border war: you fight for N tuns to capture a certain number of hexes, or a place of power, or defeat one of their legions, etc).

You can defeat someone militarily, but you can't defeat everyone militarily, because you can't depart from the rigid etiquette of hell. If you just attacked someone without a laboriously manufactured excuse, you would be outcast and everyone would turn on you. So your little border skirmishes can't actually destroy a player's stronghold until you've completed three successive vendettas and thus manufactured sufficient excuse to declare a permanent blood feud.

But what metaphorically kills me is that there's no details to the absurd demand. You assume you trot out some obscurely justified point of theology to justify your demand, or perhaps point to your genealogy as an excuse for why they were rightfully yours. But it's not specified, you just make "a demand" :) It's like, you know, diplomacy.

This also means it may be prudent to demand a few things off your neighbours, whenever you think you can get away with it, even if you're generally getting on ok with them, because you never know what you may get. But also that if everyone throws your demands back in your face at once, you may have to swallow some of the insults, because you have a very limited number of legions (typically 1 or 2) and can't typically prosecute more than one war at once.

The game is independent, produced by one guy (excluding art and suchlike), although priced comparatively expensively for that (£25), but cheaper than big commercial titles. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading the RPS diaries to see if you like it, and trying the demo which lets you play the first 25 turns.

It's very pretty, but full of baroque details. For instance, all the legions, heroes, artefacts, etc, are unique: sometimes you need anything that fulfils the general roles "fairly cheap cannon fodder" or "total beast" and sometimes you need something with some specific detail that fits with what you already have. Lots of UI, while not bad is not perfectly optimised. And the first one or two times you play, you'll end up screwed by misunderstanding some ramification of something, but that's normally recoverable -- just remember that at any time something bad might "just happen" to your best advantages.

Where it excels is a multiplayer (asynchronous) game. The AI is good enough to have great fun learning the mechanics and experimenting, but I hear doesn't really give the flavour of independent antagonistic opponents.

I'll describe my first game in the comments. Did anyone play it multiplayer when it first came out?