Saturday Morning Gaming: Stone Age
Last month, we talked about Stone Age (the board game).
Well, the game makers released Stone Age for Steam and I jumped on purchasing it.
To quickly find out that I have no idea how to play.
Like, when we play at the table, I can quite regularly get 2nd place. The first time I played the video game, I came in dead last. Okay, I’ll tweak the difficulty from “AI medium” to “AI easy”. Dead last. Then again. Then again. Then again.
Now, I did do the thing where I went to the harbor and picked the Wild Reward card and rolled a 6 and three 1s and that alone made the purchase worth it for me so I’m exceptionally pleased with the game. I just can’t win.
It’s not an issue where I roll nothing but ones and twos and the computer keeps rolling sixes. It was that the computer is very good at making optimal plays and I happen to have zero idea what the optimal play would be in any given situation. I keep going for wheat instead of going for huts. Going for the harbor instead of going for stone and then going for huts. And so I finish the game with 10 wheat, 10 workers, and 100 points while everybody else’s tribe has 6 or 7 dudes and 200 points.
So the game is actually teaching me how to play. I can regularly get to 3rd place against AI easy now.
Now, I’ll warn you, the discussions are full of people complaining that the AI is too difficult (even on easy), screaming that the AI “cheats”, so on and so forth. So, apparently, I’m not alone in the whole “sub-optimal moves” thing.
But if you’ve been thinking about shelling out for the board game but don’t know if you want to spend almost $50 on it, you can take it for a testdrive for only $15. It’ll teach you the basics of playing the game (if not how to play it well) and then you can decide whether it’d be a good game for your gaming group. (I’m pretty sure that it will be.)
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is Stone Age’s character select screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)
Still playing Diablo IV. The problem with the game is that you can clearly see the “make them grind” mechanisms at play. I don’t know that any “game as service” game can overcome that. I don’t play a lot, so it doesn’t bother me much, and I still have fun when my wife and I do couch co-op. My seasonal character is at level 66 and I can pretty much handle the Torment difficulty (thanks to a friend who carried me through a high nightmare dungeon and a pretty decent build).
However, that’s going to end later this week when I start playing Starfield. I’ll still couch co-op D4 with my wife, but otherwise, I’ll be playing space skyrim.
Speaking of adaptations of board games, I’ve found that I play better against the Wingspan bots in the app then I do the automata in the app. Weird.Report
Most of my gaming has been BG3 with my wife, though we didn’t really get to it this weekend. Many nights we can play for about an hour or so, but that can be a frustrating amount of time to play, especially if you get slaughtered in decent sized fight.
Solo, I have been playing Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition. I need to clear the Iron Throne Fight, then I will probably move to the expansion content. I have also been playing Titan Quest. Seeing the announcement that TQ2 was coming gave me the itch to play, so I bought the new expansions and started a new character. I haven’t spent much time on it, though. If my wife is still working when I get home, I have been playing while I keep her company. When I finish Baldur’s Gate, I might make it my primary game.Report