Diggity

Plankton Games – Dave Dobson

2-4 Players

Ages 12+

~30 Minutes

Overview

Diggity is a strategic card game in which each player takes turns placing cards down on the table to create a single contiguous Mine (in somewhat of a “Water Works” fashion.) each room in the mine has a symbol, or shape on it. By playing Mine rooms near each other, creating certain sequences of shapes, you can create tools that will help you protect the Gold you excavate from the Mine, or to steal it from others. Whoever has the most Gold when all Gold the cards are gone is the winner!

Rulebook

Extremely well written and incredibly concise; this is a very light game and the rules are not very complex. The rules are written on one page (front and back) and there was room leftover for diagrams. We had absolutely no trouble figuring this game out when we got down to it and well-written rules can really help a game. Rulebook gets an A+ from me.

Startup

Was really no trouble at all, thanks to the simple nature of the game; we shuffled up the Mine cards and Gold cards dealt out some Mine cards to everyone, and got right to playing. It took a couple rounds for us to see the strategy and the point of the different tools and why you might not want to use them at certain strategic points. But there is a learning curve involved with every game and this is no exception and it certainly won’t count against it. After a few rounds we really got into the swing of things and began deliberately trying to screw whoever was ahead, Diggity is quite excellent in this regard.

Art

The art in the game left little to be desired. It accomplishes what it sets out to do and it does so very cleanly. The colors are vibrant enough for the subject matter, and everything is easy to read. A+ here also.

What could be better?

Not a lot that I could think of. It would make things more interesting if maybe a fifth tool could be added in some way so that a fifth player could play the game, but I really couldn’t think of anything that would be suitable. It is difficult to improve upon a game like this because it hit its target so well as a light strategy card game for four players. There isn’t a lot of expansion potential, which I enjoy in a lot of games, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

Final Word

The experience I had with Diggity is difficult to describe…you ever order something online like, say, from Amazon, and you know that it is the size of a cell phone, but they send it to you inside a box that could fit a small TV which contains two progressively smaller boxes, full of packing peanuts and such? Diggity isn’t like that. I ordered something that is the size of a cell phone, and it came in a cell phone sized package, with no fluff, and nothing unnecessary added. The game has a purpose, and it serves that purpose in a very elegant way. Diggity is light enough to play with your kids, and compact enough to take on road trips or anywhere you go, as long as you’ll have a big enough table to play on. Diggity didn’t exactly change my life, but it serves as a role model of good design. This is a great game that does what it was meant to do without any static at all. For that, I think it deserves a 5. If you ever played Water Works, or enjoy Puzzle games, I really think you’d get a kick out of Diggity.

Check out Diggity and tons of other great games over at The Game Crafter

[The Author has graciously donated a copy of his game, ‘Diggity’ for the purposes of this review. Thank you very much! We had a lot of fun, and I appreciate your patience during the review process! If anyone else would like to have his or her game reviewed and advertised for free on www.gamersuniversity.com, please feel free to email me at Endymian @ gmail . com!]

Late post, sorry. It’s been a busy weekend. On Saturday the 17th, at 12:50pm, my son Ethan was born. He is 100% healthy and happy and is so far the quietest baby I’ve ever seen. His mommy and I are elated but the past few days have been insane. I will be back later this week after everything calms down with a review of an awesome card game called Diggity and hopefully some other neat stuff. Have a great week!

Say hello to Ethan Endymian Stedman

There is a certain subject I have been following lately, and have been doing my best to ignore, despite my strong feelings about it. I think I have finally gotten to the point that I can’t really ignore it anymore since I got this over the weekend from Blizzard PR, it is regarding the former statement that users would need to post using their real names on the Blizzard forums–a decision which has now been overturned due to overwhelming bitching response.

The open letter is below:

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime

CEO & Cofounder

Blizzard Entertainment

Now, I don’t know Mike Morhaime personally, but I did meet him at Blizzcon last year, and he seems like a pretty cool guy. He openly admits that even though he is a CEO, he still has a boss, and being that his boss is something to the tune of 15 million children and a vastly fewer sum of adults, I kind of feel bad for him. If you’ve ever been to any Blizzard game forum, you probably already know that 90% of the user-generated content contained there is, well, (pardon my vernacular) purely retarded. Your average poster on the Blizzard forums is largely ignorant, immature, angry, opinionated in subjects they know little about, loud, and anonymous.

It’s a garbage heap filled with people complaining about everything their beloved game company does, and whiners that believe whatever they think is more important than everyone else. Why on earth wouldn’t Blizzard want to attach some kind of accountability to what people say on their forums? Consider for a moment the plight of the Blizzard employee (blue poster) trying to get anything accomplished on their forums, or god forbid, making an announcement of a change or (gasp) a nerf in one of their games. Cue three hundred posts reading little more than “lol Bliz fucks us again” or “I see where my $15 is going every month lololololol”.

In my opinion, forcing people to use their real names was a bold proposition that would result in people having to take responsibility for what they were saying, and if someone had nothing better to do than trollpost, they would be inclined to do it somewhere else. I understand at the end of the day you don’t want to be you, you want to be an avatar– that’s why most people play these games in the first place, but the forum is not part of the game nor is it a game itself, and the problem is that too many people treat it like it is. The forums are for intelligent discussion, suggestions, bug reports, and a source of information from the developers. Not trolling, flaming, and general trashtalking behind a veil of anonymity and pre-adolescent rage over your specific class build getting downgraded because one jerkoff in Asia managed to break the game using an overlooked imbalance that they meticulously harnessed for their own personal gain and would obviously be taken away once it was discovered.

I think it’s obvious that I’m unhappy about this, but worse things could happen. I’m not particularly proud of Blizzard bending to the will of the angry cries of these…people. They know what they were trying to accomplish and I think it was the right thing to do to get a little bit of order or (heaven forbid) some peace and quiet for a change. But it was easy to predict that the loudest most obnoxious voices would get all the attention because let’s be honest, that is how the world works. At the end of the day though, the mob pays their bills, it was a judgment call to keep the perceived majority happy in the interest of their shareholders, and I understand that too.

It doesn’t make it right, or wrong I suppose. My hope for society just died a little, that’s all.

Happy hangover day, hope everyone had a fun 4th of July and didn’t burn anything down.

This is a little old, but they truly are terrible. It’s nice to see how far we’ve come since the minimum-wage voice acting of the PSX era. Even today’s worst games are usually better than these (exceptions of course for those titles shown from the xbox360 and DS and such, I mean holy crap those were bad too.)

Endymian and I are expecting a new little geek any day now. Daddy decided to put his crafting skills to use and here is what came of it. I think this is FANTASTIC!!!

And we’re not in it yet! Awesome!

From the press release:

Blizzard Entertainment Begins Closed Beta Test
for World of Warcraft^®: Cataclysm^™

Blizzard Entertainment announced today that the closed beta test for Cataclysm^™, its highly anticipated new expansion for World of Warcraft^®, has begun. The company has started issuing invitations to participate in the testing process to a wide range of players from around the world who signed up via their Battle.net^® accounts. While enjoying an early look at the game, beta testers will provide valuable feedback to help Blizzard Entertainment find bugs, address balance issues, and polish the new content.

“Our focus with Cataclysm has been to build on the knowledge we’ve gained through the previous expansions to deliver the best, most compelling World of Warcraft content for our players to date,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “Gathering focused feedback during the beta test will go a long way in helping us reach that goal when we launch Cataclysm later this year.”

Cataclysm is the third expansion for World of Warcraft, the most popular subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game in the world. The first two expansions, The Burning Crusade^® and Wrath of the Lich King^®, each shattered PC game sales records upon their release. In Cataclysm, the face of Azeroth will be forever altered by the return of the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing. Players will explore once-familiar areas of the world that have now been reshaped by the devastation and filled with new adventures. In an effort to survive the planet-shattering cataclysm, two new playable races — worgen and goblins — will join the struggle between the Alliance and the Horde. As players journey to the new level cap of 85, they’ll discover newly revealed locations, acquire new levels of power, and come face to face with Deathwing in a battle to determine the fate of the world.

When I was but a wee lad, sometime in the early 90’s there was a new store that opened up in my hometown called Phar-Mor. It was not unlike your average Walgreens or CVS; a pharmacy with some essential grocery type goods. But Phar-Mor was something special. They had Nintendo rentals for 39 cents a day. That’s right, 39 cents a day. My mother, bless her heart, would go out of her way to go to Phar-Mor for things she needed, and come back with one or two, or even sometimes four of these ridiculously inexpensive rentals for my brother and me to play.

In about 1992, the company’s founder and CFO (allegedly) embezzled about $10 million from the company and bankrupted it.

This meant two things, first, that I would be crying myself to sleep that night because the most awesome game rental place that ever existed was gone forever in an instant (later to be replaced by some fledgling company called BEST BUY, like that will ever work, pfft)

And second, Liquidation Sale.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad that they went away, because they had an awesome clearance on the NES games that they sold. Of which, my mother grabbed a handful for us for about $3 to $5 apiece.

Among those…was Crystalis. A game I’d never heard of before, not even in Nintendo Power or anything like that. But I was never afraid  to try a new game.

I had played games like Legend of Zelda, and Final Fantasy before, and I loved them. But I never knew until then that there was a game like those two combined.

Crystalis is a top-down Adventure RPG. You wander the world, explore dungeons, and solve puzzles (like Zelda) but you also find and buy new weapons and armor, gain experience and levels for the monsters you fight, and learn and cast magic spells (like Final Fantasy). It was in many ways the best of both worlds, the graphics for the time were stunning and the music is still hailed as some of the best ever composed in videogame history. On top of all of this, the story is rather compelling as well.

Nothing is perfect, however. This game did come with its issues. If you did not know exactly what you were doing, the game could take you a very long time to figure out. Most of the dungeons are mazes and some are very samey-looking and very easy to get lost in. Two of the puzzle/quests are very vague and send you searching for invisible objects in not-so-clearly-defined locations. And each sword has an element, and almost every enemy is immune to at least one, so there is a lot of menu hopping and sword-switching. But really, beyond those small gripes, the game holds up. It’s still challenging, but not ridiculously difficult; and it is so damn fun to play.

I am a huge fan of Final Fantasy and Zelda 2 in particular, but in my opinion, this is the best game ever released for the NES, and it so richly deserves a sequel, but unfortunately its developer SNK no longer exists. Some other company bought the rights to port the game to the GameBoy Color, which was cool at the time if you had a GBC, but in most regards the port is vastly inferior and frustratingly different.

It would make my day if somebody gave this game a good makeover in the form of a rom hack that was a sequel or a story extension of some kind. There are a couple of rom hacks for Crystalis out there but as far as I know they just add toilet humor to the dialog.

If you’ve never tried this game before, give it a shot (there are tons of rom sites out there for you to try it out) or go pick it up at your nearest vintage used game store. It’s well worth the trip.

Enix made some games like this on the SNES, like SoulBlazer and Illusion of Gaia, but those are for another day. Enjoy this one if you can find it, it’s a gem.

Class Dismissed!

Good morning everyone, please say hello to my good friend Professor Farkling. He’ll be taking the reins for me on this lovely Monday morning while I am engaged with other pressing matters. I hope to be back with some free time to update some more later this week, but until then, please enjoy!

(and now we have a tabletop RPGs category, just for you!)

-Endymian

Greetings fellow gamers, wanderers of the internet and/or opinion seekers!

I realize I’m a complete unknown here, but I have submitted this guest column to Endymian in the event he needs some coverage or blogging space during this busy time of his real life (as opposed to his internet life).

My online handle is Farkling, or Professor Farkling if you are feeling formal.

I am also a Gamer for Life, though of a different breed than Endymian himself.  I’m far more critical than Endymian.  He’s at heart a nice, enthusiastic guy.  I am also less of a console gamer, and more of a pen and paper RPG person.  However, as Endymian does NOT have an RPG category here at Gamer’s University, I will not spend my first shot at the pixels on something like ‘An in depth glance at the versatility of the 6^th Edition Revised HERO System’

We can save a discussion or evaluation of various RPG’s for a site that is actively interested. *heh*

Boardgames are definitely one of the places Endymian and I find common ground (well, and certain Square products…).    So I was going to beat him to the punch and give a short look at Dungeon Lords (from Z-Man Games).  However, I felt it might be better to, say, establish credentials with his normal readers.  So I shall give pocket commentary on the games he has reviewed.

Dominion

We are both fond of this game.  We both suffer from being distracted by the shinies, or revenge or trying to find shields.  It does not take long to learn.  It is difficult to be a master.  The next time Endymian and I play this like our most recent game, we are going to have to find a way to assault one of our fellow players.  I think we need to actively interfere with him to win.  He is very good at deck building.

It isn’t complicated though, even if we make it sound that way.  The rules are fairly easy to follow, and include examples.  Speaking from the point of view of an instructor, I have quickly taught this to both an 11-year old, and to non-gamers.  The game is slick enough that if the medieval theme doesn’t put off your non-gamer spouse / friends, you should be able to get them to play through a few times.  My non-gamer spouse likes it a lot, and has managed to distract me with shinies and bring in a few wins.

(My nephew say, if the medieval ruler thing does put off anyone, get the Seaside expansion to go along with it.  Everyone likes pirates if there are no ninjas!)

One clarification.   Combining an expansion to increase the players is designed for six players at most.  When we have played with 8 we have been playing a little looser with the rules as written.  We are also all veteran players, so the downtime between turns doesn’t stack up.

Thunderstone

I have played Thunderstone multiple times.  I have played many, many hands of Dominion.  I have played quite a few games of Tomb.  Thunderstone is a Dominion style of Tomb in my eyes.  However, it lacked the spark for me that Tomb and Dominion have.  It is trying to be both style of game, and just doesn’t make the grade for me personally.  I do like the mechanic for leveling up your adventurers.  I also admire the need for ‘Light’ to penetrate into the Dungeons.  The mechanic of using resources provided by the defeated monsters feels like it needed more thought, and the treasure system lacks something that I still can’t describe.  Also, this is in my eyes, a game for gamers (as Tomb is).  I could teach Dominion to my mother, and she would probably like it.  She would try Tomb with her grandson.  I can’t picture teaching Thunderstone to a non-gamer that didn’t like one of those games.

Additional observation:  Thunderstone has more of a point than Dominion.  There is a definite goal.  ‘Kill the Monsters.  Find the Thunderstone.’  I think the downside to me stems from the Thunderstone being the goal, yet not the win.  Perhaps Endymian and I could discuss that online at some point.  Perhaps Endymian and I should review the extra Dominion boxes instead.

Sorry for the massive post.  I should be shorter and more to the point.

Thanks for reading.  Let Endymian know if I should post more or be stricken from the rolls.

Cheers!

Farkling

Oh, and while I’m here…

(wtf?)

It has been a crazy past couple of weeks so I am a little behind on the latest and greatest. As far as informational updates go, I have been at the doctors office and hospital lately way more times than I care to, for both myself and for my wife who should be giving birth to our new baby boy here within the next two or three weeks.

For those of you who aren’t following all the new Battle.net features being implemented with Starcraft 2, some of them are spilling over into World of Warcraft and will also be utilized in future titles, such as Diablo 3.

Here are the details from the newsletter:

Soon, World of Warcraft® players will have access to a brand-new feature called Real ID, a completely voluntary and optional level of identity that will keep players connected across all of Battle.net®. When you and a friend mutually agree to become Real ID friends, you’ll have access to a number of additional features that will enrich your social gaming experience in new and exciting ways:
	Real Names for Friends: Your Real ID friends will appear under their real-life names on your friends list, when chatting, communicating in-game, or viewing a character’s profile. Real ID friends can also see who’s on each other’s Real ID friends list, making it easy for players to connect with other people they know.
	Cross-Realm and Cross-Game Chat: With Real ID, friends can chat cross-realm and cross-faction in World of Warcraft, and will be able to chat across future Blizzard games such as StarCraft® II.
	Rich Presence: See additional info on your friends list about what your Real ID friends are up to in World of Warcraft and upcoming games like StarCraft II in real time.
	Broadcasts: Broadcast a short status message for all of your Real ID friends to see, whether you want to issue a call-to-arms or let your friends know about an important change of plans.
	Friend Once, See All Characters: Real ID friends will automatically see all of each other’s characters on their friends list – even characters created in future Blizzard games – helping players stay connected with the people they enjoy playing with most.
Getting Started: To send a Real ID friend request to another player, you’ll simply enter his or her Battle.net account name (an email address) using the Add Friend function in-game. The other player will see the pending request in their friends list, and if they accept, you will become Real ID friends with each other. Real ID Parental Controls: With the launch of Real ID, we will be updating our Parental Controls, giving parents the ability to decide whether their child can participate in Real ID. We’ll be sending an email to existing Parental Controls users with more information once the feature becomesavailable. Real ID is scheduled to launch with World of Warcraft patch 3.3.5; keep an eye on www.worldofwarcraft.com for details.

I’ve been working on a retro review for one of my favorite games of all time that I’ve decided to play again recently since I have spent a lot of time just down and trying to chill from some medical issues I’ve had going on. But everything should be fine and back to normal soon.

In the meantime, have a great week

Class dismissed