This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.

GeekNights 20110419 - 7 Wonders

edited April 2011 in GeekNights

Tonight on GeekNights, we review 7 Wonders, a fairly solid Antoine Bauza boardgame. Also, Scott geekbites Ace of Spades, and Armenia chooses chess as a component in national education.

Download MP3

Comments

  • Don't you dare dis on the game and watch. My early days of gaming was Mario Bros on the game and watch and yes that game is addicting (even more so in the remake in Game and Watch Gallery 3). I believe my high score on Star mode was just over 1200, there are a ton of great games on that platform that the DS could so take advantage of it is not even a joke.

    However to be fair almost all Tiger Electronics are shit and should never be played.
  • However to be fair almost all Tiger Electronics are shit and should never be played.
    Ascuse me?

    X-Men, Sonic 2, Home Alone, Aladdin, Street Fighter 2, there were tons of good Tiger LCD games. Every bit as good, if not better, than Game & Watches.
  • Man, I have played 7 Wonders like 5 or 6 times now (not counting the games we messed up) I've won all but one. It has to be a bad game if I do that well :-p
  • Man, I have played 7 Wonders like 5 or 6 times now (not counting the games we messed up) I've won all but one. It has to be a bad game if I do that well :-p
    Having played it a few more times, I want to play it with you now. ;^)
  • Having played it a few more times, I want to play it with you now. ;^)
    I think part of the strategy is to have Rubin next to you :-p
  • Having played it a few more times, I want to play it with you now. ;^)
    I think part of the strategy is to have Rubin next to you :-p
    Except I won the last two games we played at Rym's place.
  • edited April 2011
    I have three things I take in account when I play 7 Wonders.
    1. What way does my wonder want me to play?
    2. What way does the first round of cards seem to lean me towards and what resources are the people around me getting?
    3. What are the people doing next to me and how can I deny them the cards they need? (either by burning them in the wonder or playing them if I have nothing better to do.)
    If I actually pay attention to these, I win. Only time I lost was I had a wonder that wasn't working well with the cards I was getting and the player that won had no interaction with me to my right or left.

    You can go really off the wrong way if you pick a path to victory that your wonder doesn't work with. Kinda like in Race to the Galaxy if you choose to ignore your starting world.
    Post edited by Cremlian on
  • Sure, I like the meta moment, specially when there is not any meta-meta.
  • edited April 2011
    I like having a meta moment, it keeps me up to date with geeky things. I don't think it's necessary to spend more then 20 seconds on a single event coming up, but I dabble in too many geeky things to keep up with all the cool events happening.
    Even if your not going to the event or running the event, I enjoy hearing about it as a reminder.
    Post edited by Mosquitoboy on
  • I also vote in favor of the meta moment, however the things that you are not going to can be easily adjusted to an open Google calendar on your site and read a line saying "for any nerdy thing we are aware of check out the calendar on our website" problem solved.
  • I also vote in favor of the meta moment, however the things that you are not going to can be easily adjusted to an open Google calendar on your site and read a line saying "for any nerdy thing we are aware of check out the calendar on our website" problem solved.
    That is a ingenious idea! I support that fully!
  • Speaking of the Find the Future game did anyone get an email about it?
  • Just listened to this one so some thoughts:

    - Going back to the discussion on using play to enhance education, there is some great studies on the use of role playing at a young age. Some researchers at a university in Denver created a classroom program around it called "Tools of the Mind" if anyone wants to look it up. Basically, students are instructed through make-believe type play, but instead of the freeform creativity that tends to break down after five minutes, students must pick a role, draft a "play plan" (a list of their objectives/motivation) and then act out that character for at least a half hour, maybe longer.

    This is shown to have drastic effects in ramping up speech development as it forces them to use words to explain themselves, and gets them out of their vocabulary comfort zone. It also piggybacks on those Jane McGonigal theories that when the mind is at play, it is receptive to learning. I read about all of this in a book called Nurture Shock which was a fantastic read for anyone who is interested in science and society, even if you don't have kids or aren't planning on them. Here's the one line synopsis "Society's most popular strategies for raising children are in fact backfiring because key points in the science of child development and behavior have been overlooked." The two researchers who wrote the book are basically the Mythbusters of behavioral science, and they back their shit up.

    - Scott could only steal the Sphynx's nose if he was Carmen Sandiego

    - I'm happy to hear that 7 Wonders is more of a warmup game because I've held off on buying it. Since I already have enough of these types, I probably never will purchase it now, so that's a few dollars saved. Zooloretto is definitely one of my favorite warmup games (and one of the first games I ever felt I'd totally solved), but rather than for warm up, I have been using it to slowly wean non-gamers or casual gamers onto beefier titles. We have a few couples friends who have gone from board game haters to players of Ticket to Ride and Zooloretto.

    Next I'm going to try bumping it up to Aquaretto, which while it is no El Grande or T&E, is an incremental step up from Zooloretto in complexity. In Aquaretto, you are forced to define your own pen structure and size, so if you don't plan smartly the game will kick you in the nuts. There's also a little worker placement thing towards the end where you can choose some score modifiers. A little planning ahead to benefit from one or two of these also goes a long way.
  • You mention in the podcast that your computer classes had "Oregon trail" installed on them*, but you were never told to play it. I actually think that this was a smarter approach. If I was given an assignment to play some edu-game, I probably would have either not done so (getting the information needed to pass the assignment from another kid) or if I couldn't do that, I would at any rate never have gone back to playing it on my own time. By making sure that Oregon trail was something you figured out on your own, they made the game more interesting to bored, smart kids.

    ___________________________________________________________
    *I went to school in the 90s, and on a different continent, so I have only a vague idea of what Oregon Trail is, but you seemed to think it's good for developing kids. (What I know about OT is roughly: "It's a text-based strategy/"management sim" where you play a family traveling to Oregon from the eastern seaboard. And people can get dysentery.")
  • edited April 2011
    Oregon trail probably isn't the best educational game out there. It's actually not really all that educational. All I learned from it is the course of the Oregon trail, various landmarks along its path, how better to use an Apple // keyboard, how to flip a 5.25" floppy disk. On the Mac version I learned how to shoot with a mouse.

    Also http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • I wonder if there is any educational game that is really "good." The only major ones I've had experience with were the Carmen Sandiego series, but in retrospect they also seem to be somewhat lacking in the "game" area. It seems like many of the games that are good as games tend not to be very educational. On the flip side, most educational games (or "edutainment" as they were once called), tend to be kind of cruddy games that attempt to shoehorn education into a video game format and fail miserably. It doesn't help that many educational games tend to be written by second-tier developers and therefore are severely lacking in the graphical and sound technology department when compared to games developed purely for entertainment purposes.
  • I always enjoyed typing games. Pure test of skill. I had a copy of Mario Teaches Typing at home and played voluntarily.
  • Has anyone played with the expansion, 7 Wonders: Leaders?

    I think it's a fun addition to the game. My friends and I normally play it whenever we hang out. It's another random element that if used properly can help you win. There are a lot of different leaders from history to choose from, so you'll have to keep referencing back to the book if you don't know what the symbols are.

    I had to listen to the podcast again to figure out a better way to win. I think I will try going the green card/technology route next time and concentrate less on military.
  • My friend has the expansion, but I haven't had a chance to play it yet. Not sure if he has either.

    From my experience with the game, military is not a very good route to put time into. It maxes out at 18 victory points, whereas going with technology or monuments (or whatever the blue cards are) tends to net higher. Especially with technology if no one else goes that route, you can clean up.
  • Yeah. I got stuck into that obvious competitive mode, and go for that. However, there are some leaders that give you military which is nice. Other leaders can give you the bonuses of your opponents' guilds.
Sign In or Register to comment.