Saturday Morning Gaming: Yahtzee but, like, a roguelike deckbuilder
I love Yahtzee. It’s a good game for playing solo, it’s a good game for a group, it’s a good game for a grownup to play with a child and it gives the joys of getting better at math without feeling like an educational game.
They came out with little handheld devices (that have since been discontinued, I guess… they’re only available at wacky prices or on Ebay) and it was no longer something that required multiple players. Play it, play it again, quickly learn that 200 is par. Like, if you get 199, you’re irritated. If you get 200, that’s baseline. That’s expected. I think that the best score I ever got was somewhere around 255.
Well, there’s a new game out there on Steam that takes Yahtzee and makes it a roguelike deckbuilder kinda game: Rogue Rollout.
The basic idea is that it’s yahtzee, but this time you get random bonuses and penalties.
Like, maybe you’ll get a bonus that lets you play Full House more than once or a penalty that makes it so that a triples score is worth less.
They start you off easy. You only have to get 100 points, which is a piece of cake. You have to *TRY* to not get 100 points. Then you have to get 130 points. Then 200… and right around there, you realize that you *NEED* the bonuses from this point on. And you curse whenever one of the penalties kick in. The bonus points go from being a “nice to have” to being a “need to have”.
And it’s yet another “one more game, one more game, one more game” that really plays with the ideas behind Yahtzee. If you’ve ever thought deep thoughts about Yahtzee theory (and who hasn’t?), then you’ll at least want to check out the (free!) demo.
So… what are you playing?
Just beat Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
I realize now that I beat Assassin’s Creed II and I beat Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood but I must have only played the first couple of hours of Revelations before getting distracted by… lemme check the release date… Oh, jeez. November 2011.
Which means that it was competing with Skyrim and Arkham City. Yeah, Revelations didn’t have a chance.
Anyway, I beat it for the first time and, holy cow, it’s pretty good. It addressed the whole “people who play like Jaybird” issue by giving so very many things to purchase that I never once felt flush with cash. I beat II and Brotherhood feeling like I was this close to being a millionaire… and this one, I always felt broke. No matter how much cash I got, I always had another two dozen things to buy. “What do you mean this costs 40k? Ah, jeez…”
So I’d buy one or two and do the proto-phone game for the assassins and just wander around to the main missions because, hey, at least those were free.
And the game is good! The story is good! And I realize that I want to play 3 again, even though I remember it being preachy, because I might merely have been cranky.
And I want to see what happens next with this whole Desmond thing (which, I understand, turns out unsatisfyingly).
But, wow, the Ezio collection is great. A local maximum for video games.Report
Ten minutes into Assassin’s Creed III and they’re shipping Haytham Kenway off to Boston in order to find the storehouse.
I’m mostly feeling wistful about this world in which sometimes you’d just go across an ocean to faff about for a while.Report