Greetings, fellow gamers, and welcome to another entry in the Board Game Review series of Game On posts! This week, I shall describe a game that I learned to play at my local board game cafe’s Kickstarter Backer Party! The game in question is Alchemists. Remember the system I devised for reviewing these games? Here it is again:
Author Archives: PinkFae Archives
Social Stigma in Roleplaying Games
I was introduced to GURPS (the Generic Universal Role Playing System, published by Steve Jackson Games) in 1991. I admired the flexibility and adaptability of the system, as well as its realism and the fact that it encouraged rounded, dynamic characters. It didn’t limit possible character traits to attributes and skills, but had mental, emotional, and social advantages and disadvantages. This allowed players to emulate a personality more fully than in games like Dungeons and Dragons. But there was one disadvantage that I have never given a character: Social Stigma. It provides an in-game mechanic for simulating a character that belongs to a group that is deemed by his or her society to be inferior. In looking back on it, I realise that I didn’t fully grasp the possibilities of this disadvantage. Now, I have learned much, and I would love the opportunity to play a character with this disadvantage.
Video Game Review: Long Live the Queen
Long Live the Queen is a life-simulation/RPG game where you control a fledgling princess in a land rife with danger, and seek to train her skills and keep her alive until her coronation as Queen in 40 weeks. The characters and lore are well-written, and while at first the anime graphics and simple weekly events recap may lull you into a sense of security (no news is good news?), you soon realize, possibly after your first untimely death, that there are several hidden subplots lurking beneath the surface, and you have to account for them in future play throughs or die horribly, again.
Stories in Games – Our Most Fun Experiences
When people sit down to play games, what exactly are they doing? I spoke of this a bit a couple of weeks ago. Depending on the nature of the game, we are doing things that can be just as difficult as a so-called ‘job.’ Games come in so many different forms; games of luck, of physical prowess, of strategy, of skill (broken into many different types of skill; spatial reasoning, manual dexterity, mathematical ability, and so forth), games of knowledge or memory or bluffing or deduction… It may be obvious by now that I am most strongly drawn towards games that have a series element of telling stories.
Video Game Review: Resident Evil: Revelations
This was my first real foray into Resident Evil, and I liked it so much that I finished the entire game in one sitting that went way late into the morning.
Though I have no other Resident Evil benchmark to compare it to, I thought the campaign story was really neat and well done, lots of twists that kept me guessing. Most of the characters had interesting personalities, though as a new player to the Resident Evil series with no prior background knowledge of the characters besides knowing they exist, I feel not much was done with Chris and Jill outside of them obviously being “the celebrity couple that won’t admit it” in the game. I suppose you’re meant to know them from previous games, but as a standalone, they ended up being the flattest characters even though you get to play the both of them and thus like them by virtue of them being an extension of “you”.