There are several more games I need to review and I also would like to write a bit more about reviewing and perhaps change the way I write reviews but it occurred to me that there are a number of game related things I am quite excited about at the moment and this being the last day of the year a post about these items might be a good idea.
No, this is not a cheeky game review but rather a review of a game called Smart Ass.
Smart Ass is a rather simple but interesting Trivia Game from University Games, a nifty little company that I had never heard of before playing Smart Ass. Essentially the game is about one player giving the others little clues until someone can identify What, Who, or Where the “I” of the question is. The game moves fairly quickly and while it has a few snags should appeal to anyone who likes trivia.
I have several new games I am planning to talk about and review soon and it came to my attention as I was driving to work today that quite a number of them are card games. After making this realization I decided I wanted to post a quick note about it and see if anyone else has noticed this rather interesting change in game design in recent years, where card games seem to be making a move from the casual to the more strategic.
This isn’t exactly news at this point (it was posted a week ago) but I thought I should direct your attention to it anyway. One week ago Catalyst Game Labs announced that it has made an offer to The Topps Company to purchase “various WizKids’ properties, including such dynamic game lines as HeroClix, the Pirates Pocket Model Game, BattleTech/MechWarrior, and Shadowrun“.
I find it interesting that games these days don’t seem to fit as snugly into the gamer or non-gamer types. For a while now you could find Magic: The Gathering at stores that didn’t carry games of the more complex sort but often that was the exception to the rule. As things have gone along however more stores are beginning to carry games that they would not have carried five or ten years ago.
I mentioned in my last post that I had not yet received my pulped tree format of the Shadowrun Companion.
Heading over to the Shadowrun site to try and figure out why my pulped tree version of the Runner’s Companion wasn’t in yet I discovered Catalyst’s newest product with an apparent street date of October 14th: Cthulhutech.
Continuing from Part 1: Magic’s Evolution, here I’ll briefly examine the business side of gaming that these changes to Magic: the Gathering expose.
Magic Online 3.0 went live a while back and shortly after that I slowed down my drafting and then a bit after that more or less quit Magic altogether. Not “for good” but I had a number of problems with the new program and I figured I should walk away and let them sort the mess out. Also, as I have made fairly clear on this site, I was not and am not a big fan of Shadowmoor.
