The Game of Life

[vinylrake]

I played "The Game of Life" with my kids last week, and man that game sucks. All you do is spin this wheel and go around the board paying or collecting money - it seems the whole secret to winning is to get a high paying job/career (which is totally randomly assigned) so that at the end you have more money than your opponents. That's IT! No battles, no scouting, no flanking the enemy, no explosives or sneak attacks with pus ghols or anything remotely interesting. The only "unit" you get to control is your main "token" which is a person in a car. The person can't move unless they are in the car and even the car can only go in one direction and has to stay on a pre-defined path and has to move based on your spin of the wheel! Where is the freedom of choice? Where is the strategy? After a while you can get a spouse and children but they have to be in the car with you and they don't have any special attacks or anything. You can't even attack the other players, how lame is that? I thought I would at least be able to sneak attack the bank to get more money so I could win sooner, so when it was my turn I told my (real life) kids that I was sending my (game) kids in to the bank with explosives to rob the bank they told me I couldn't do that because there weren;t any explosives in the game. I told them that because my player's career was a mechanic he was able to cannibalize the car to get parts to make a bomb but they still wouldn't let me do it. God, the game of life really sucks, I wouldn't recommend it at all if you like Myth.

[Baak]

ROFLMAO!!

[vinylrake]

I also played a retro old school strategic wargame the other day, it's called "Chess". It's kind of a like a really low rez version of Myth, if it were a computer game it could probably run on an Atari 2600. Actually I guess there are computer versions of this game around, but this was a real life game with pieces and a board and stuff. Basically you move your units around the battlefield and do battle with your opponent.

The playing field is pretty boring, the terrain is non existant - it's all flat and the color map is a boring black and white pattern of alternating squares. There's no water or scenery or buildings or anything. There's no unit trading allowed, so each player has the same set of units and since the goal is to capture the enemy king it's really nothing more than a rudimentary version of "assassin".

I guess there are some really intricate unit pieces out there, but all the units in the version I played were kind of abstract - like a 1930's modern artist might imagine a soldier to look like. A 1930's artist on acid maybe. There are a handful of different units that roughly correspond to Myth units; pawns are warriors/thrall, rooks are dwarves, bishops are like archers, knights are like bre'nor or pus ghols, the queen is kind of like Alric, and the King is kind of like the Baron. But the weird thing is that in terms of game play all the units have the same attack - there's no fighting or battles or special attacks, you just automatically kill the enemy when you move into it's space - there's no blood or gore (tiny ketchup packets would do wonders for the realism of the game) so the only hope for any fun action would be if you got to battle your opponent in real time trying to take out each other's pieces as fast as possible - but you can't do that because (and here you see how old this game is) you have to take TURNS to move! Again with the lame-ass wussy "take turns" mode of play. ARGH!

This game has a reasonable amount of strategy if you want to spend hours thinking about which piece to move (bore-fest), but it really suffers in the action and war-game simulation categories - there is no action at all, and the fighting is all so abstract that while I was waiting for my opponent to move I kept forgetting I was in the middle of a game - often slipping off into daydreams of throwing lit dorf bottles at my opponent to see if he was awake. If you like the real-time battle elements of Myth I would stay away from this game at all costs.

Oh one last thing, there aren't any different game types allowed, there's only the one standard "Assassin" game, but Chess does have this weird rule where if you get a unit all the way to the other side of the board you can replace it with any unit you want, so in that way it's kind of a rudimentary pseudo deathmatch. Since it has deathmatch the game isn't a total waste of time, but it's still pretty lame.

[Guest]

I used to watch my older siblings play the game of life when I very young. I think I "played" too, but basically just spun the wheel device in the center and move everything for me. I remember the big joke was something switching the pink piece in the car to another blue when the other player wasn't looking. Ha ha (hear song..."are you going, to San Francisco?....). I remember chewing on the ball head of the plastic peg (that would ride in the cars), which basically turned the piece into the elephant man. This did not go over well.

The poor farm used to scare the crap out of me. You go the entire game and that little diversion at the end was looming.

There is a dude on one of the bills with shiny cheese cheeks.

Now STRATEGO...that was a fun game

TS

[Baak]

I remember chewing on the ball head of the plastic peg (that would ride in the cars), which basically turned the piece into the elephant man.

Art Linkletter on the $100,000 bill - sheesh. Did you know there actually was a $100,000 bill? Woodrow Wilson was on it. Amazing coincidence hidden in there somewhere...

Now STRATEGO...that was a fun game

Oh man, I loved Stratego!! The Spy was so cool (although I was too young to understand why a spy would have a stove-pipe hat to "blend in" - seemed like he should have had a mask instead). I even made a Field Marshall hat to wear during imaginary battles in the backyard!

Risk was cool too, but I always s00ked at it. The "x10" pieces rocked, and I always wanted "The Ukraine" just because it was the biggest piece of territory on the map. Also one of the islands that was connected with a line I thought was cool - think that might have been Indonesia - and the map version of it looked completely different than the card (a few were like that) - and I seem to recall one of the islands looked too much like a jumping dog!

Fun times!

[vinylrake]

Risk was cool too, but I always s00ked at it. The "x10" pieces rocked, and I always wanted "The Ukraine" just because it was the biggest piece of territory on the map.

That's the main reason I enjoy watching "Alias" - almost every show has at least one mention to countries or regions which I first heard about from Risk. Seriously, who ever heard of irkutsk other than from Risk?

Also one of the islands that was connected with a line I thought was cool - think that might have been Indonesia

Yeah, that Indonesian island chain was part of the ONLY continent on the map (also had New Guinea, Western and Eastern Australia) that had only one point of attack - Indonesia was the entry point - many a game I built my doomed empire from that remote corner of the world.

Risk central (Risk 2210 AD? )[/url]

[Two Saks]

actually, wasn't ot SIAM in the Asia contintent (has anyone EVER held Asia???) that was the "gate keeper" to the smallest risk continent? I remember too VR - you can easily take that island chain and AU, but can just as easily be eternally blocked.

Baak LOL I remember you loveing the Urkraine. For some reason I liked North Africa. I think because you could go across the ocean to Brazil or into Southern Europe.

North America was awesome - pretty easy to hold - had three ways in - Greenland from Iceland, Alaska from Kamchatka and from South America. You got 5 reienforcement units if you did hold, so could amass an army to head out.

The original Risk pieces where funky, at least the 10 unit on - it was in a "twinki" shape?

TS

[vinylrake]

actually, wasn't ot SIAM in the Asia contintent (has anyone EVER held Asia???) that was the "gate keeper" to the smallest risk continent?

That wasn't actually the asian continent that was the smallest, Asia was the largest - the smallest continent - the one with the single route to it was the australian continent - at least according to my unflappable (definitely not infallible) memory and hasbro-
"The continents are North America (YELLOW), South America (ORANGE), Europe (PURPLE), Africa (BROWN), Asia (GREEN), and Australia (GRAY).

Example: New Guinea, Indonesia, Eastern Australia, and Western Australia are territories. Together, these four territories make up the continent of Australia."

I remember too VR - you can easily take that island chain and AU, but can just as easily be eternally blocked.

Yes, that's what I usually did; stockpiled my units until someone else had 10x as many, then I would go on the offensive. Remember, I said "doomed empire".

The original Risk pieces where funky, at least the 10 unit on - it was in a "twinki" shape?

When I used to play as a kid/teen they were plastic 3 pointed 'stars' and the 10s were 6 pointed 'stars'. BUT the first set I remember ever playing had small wooden pieces.

[Baak]

That other giant territory in NE Asia was cool too: Yurkutsk? The BIG one that's somewhat squarish.

The pieces we had on our RISK board were little wooden blocks. In fact, I recall that one of them was miscut and always looked funny. The x10 pieces were unusual: imagine a shape something like a Toblerone bar, like a triangular block, longer and thinner than the x1 blocks (which were nearly a perfect cube). Then round the corners and imagine the edges taper towards the ends. If you sliced one of these little guys like cheese, the very ends would be circles (and these circles wouldn't touch the table since all the edges coming to them were tapered) and would become progressively more triangular as you went towards the center. The center "slice" would be a triangle with slightly rounded edges.

They just felt cool in your hands (besides the thrill of having several in one place!)

Check this out - they made a 40th anniversary edition of the game! Holy crap:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000IWFF/002-7128691-1776852

Also some strategies here:
http://www.gilwood-cs.dsl.pipex.com/riskmove-sz.htm

In trying to find the game piece (all I could find were the plastic ones...), I stumbled on one showing Monopoly pieces (an interesting but truly lousy game) - who the h*** thought an "iron" was a good game piece?!?
http://www.acclaimimages.com/search_terms/game_piece.html

We had the iron, boot (with the world's longest hand strap in the back), cannon (by far the cheapest piece, with a bent barrel - could have been nice, thick and 3D - a real cannon), guy on horseback (another cheaper piece), thimble, hat (which looked more like the Monopoly guy's hat than the one pictured here), and wheelbarrow (my fave). Our wheelbarrow looked better than the one pictured though - amazing how everything gets cheaper over time!

Never saw a "money bag" piece - is that from a Special Edition or something?

An iron... what the?!?

[vinylrake]

Yakutsk (good guess).

When you can't find a picture of the pieces from a 40 year old board game look on ebay

Also, I just found the kewlest thing - Hasbro lets you download PDFs of game manuals! Hereis the Risk Manual.