Nuketown

Game Day: Risk 2210, 3-Way Clix, Catan on Xbox 360

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 05/04/2007 - 11:51am

Board games return to the forefront this week as we prepare to play the game of Risk 2210 that got snowed out in March. Risk 2210 is a supercharged version of regular Risk that adds sea and moon colonies,special commander units that allow people to buy and play diplomacy, naval, space, land and nuke themed cards, and is played over the course of five turns. The game's been one of our group favorites since we first playtested it for one of my SCIFI.com reviews, I've already discussed Risk 2210 extensively in a previous column, so I'll refer you there for more Risky goodness.

3-Way Clix

HeroClix has continued to enjoy a resurgence within our gaming group,  with folks going so far as to organize mid-week gaming sessions in addition to the occasional Friday pre-game matches. Our present Holy Grail is to design effective teams for use in three-way battles which account for perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of our group's HeroClix matches. Evil Genius and Erilar have been strategizing about it in our group's forums, with Evil Genius arguing that good 3-way armies need:

  1. Lots of actions.
  2. A two-figure-per-100-points spent ratio.
  3. Some way of tying up your opponents.

I'm inclined to agree. I recently built a 400-point army designed specifically for 3-way combat. It's a Barrier/Phasing team that's designed to bog down one or both opposing teams while increasing my own team's mobility. I use cheap Barrier pieces like Avalanche and Blizzard to throw up and maintain solid walls and use figures such as Magik, Shadowcat, Vision and Silver Samurai to quickly strike at my opponents, carrying along a cheap combat unit or two along with them. I also use Psylocke, who has Enhancement (which boosts range attack damage by one) as well as Blades, to support and defend my Barrier figures. I've only played it once in a two-way battle, but I think it will work well against three opponents.

Catan on Xbox 360

 The big news this week for board gamers with Xbox 360s is that Settlers of Catan was released as an Xbox Live game. It can be played locally as a single player game against AI opponents, or online versus human ones. I bought it last night and played two quick single player games.

I can report that the game is extremely faithful to the original, and still feels like Catan. It's got a randomly assembled hexagonal board, all of the standard development card and a straight-forward trading system. So far the AI seems pretty solid; I won't my first game against "Easy" opponents, but lost a close game against "Moderate" ones. The AI players are shrewd enough not to trade with you if you've got too much of a lead, and they appear to hold grudges against opponents who consistently mess with them (by, for example, regularly hitting them with the robber).

I'm looking forward to some online play this weekend with some of my fellow Geezer Gamers, and this might just be the game that gets my Mom to upgrade to a 360 (she being something of a Catan fanatic because of the Windows version). Although the tabletop version of  is very popular with my gaming group, we won't be playing it online just yet because I'm the only one with a 360 … but that might change over the next year or so.

Kenneth Newquist said,

Mon, 05/07/2007 - 7:53am

So, it was looking bad for Evil Genius during Friday night's Risk 2210 game. His hold on Australia was broken, his moon colonies were scattered, his offshore sea colonies were sinking.

My forces, as befits the Herald, were ascendant, having secured North and South America and several sea colonies. I did not, however, abandon my mantra as herald, that Bob -- aka Evil Genius -- was the Real Enemy.

And lo ... I was right. Because the bastard managed to draw two colony influence cards and seize just enough of Asia to shoot past me and win the freaking game AGAIN!

I'm not bitter though. I came in second, which seems fitting for a Herald (and beats my last 10 or so Risk 2210 outings, in which I typically raced Jon to the bottom).

The game was also memorable for what may have been the best played round of nuclear annihilation ever. Erilar went the Nuke Commander route, accumulating a stockpile of nuke cards and then setting them off with the "Armageddon" card, which costs 4 energy but then lets everyone play any nuke cards they have for free. The rest of us didn't have any nuke cards, so Erilar was able to hit us again and again without any fear of retribution. It wasn't enough to win him the game, but it sure did change the balance of power.

All in all, it was a great night of Risk, though as we said then, it also reminded us why we only play every year or so. We can only take so much "Risk tactics" (in which one army holds off 30) each year.

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evilgenius said,

Mon, 05/07/2007 - 3:37pm

Yes, it was a difficult game from Turn 1 until the end of Turn 4. The Awesome Armageddon of turn 3 left much of Asia empty, allowing me to blitz through with very few armies and take quite a few provinces.

They wouldn't have withstood even a light attack but as it turned out, no one really had the position nor inclination to make those attacks. :)

Then being able to spread out mostly uncontested on the moon in the final turn and regain my hold on australia, combined with the overall 12 points in Colony Cards, well, that's a pretty powerfull combo. :)

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