Father's Day Amusements

Well, there was going to be a regular post this week, but I’ve spent Father’s Day weekend playing games with my kids and essentially accomplished nothing.  But, you know: in the best way.

Yesterday was around 5 hours of Portal Knights.  If you haven’t played it, it’s basically Legend of Zelda meets Minecraft.  So there’s equal parts fighting wandering monsters, exploring dungeons, and talking to townspeople along with planting trees, mining for copper, and constant expansions to the insanely large house you’re building.  The cool thing is how these seemingly dissimilar gameplay elements interact: can’t reach a cool place you want to explore?  Just build a bridge or some stairs to it.  Can’t find the door to the dungeon?  Just pickaxe through the wall.  Contrariwise, can’t build that cool wardrobe you need to hold all your extra stuff?  Just explore until you find someone else’s house that already has one and just take it.  I had a human wizard I made back when I played for a while with the Smaller Animal, but for this game it was just the baby girl and I, so I created a furfolk ranger.  I optimized him for being able to just sit still and shoot the shit out of things: I put every ability point into dexterity and constitution, built the best bow I could, took bow master and the sentry power that increases your damage if you shoot without moving.  Then I started grinding: I let my daughter concentrate on house building and interior decoration while I provided construction site security.  Eventually I got to the point where nothing in the level could kill me before I just shredded it into oblivion without ever moving.  Sweet.  And then of course I started fulfilling requests from my daughter (go find me a wardrobe, we need more copper blocks, etc etc).  It becomes very easy to lose yourself in games like these, where they’re just hard enough that you’re not bored but just easy enough that they don’t piss you off too much and you quit.  The 5 hours was gone before I knew it ... and that’s why I don’t play videogames any more.  I’d never accomplish anything.

Today was board games, by my specific request.  We started “simply,” with The Wizard Always Wins.  This is one of those games that seems moderately simple: the rules are just barely complex enough to warrant a second reading to clarify some of the finer points, but it turns out that it’s chock full of interesting choices and competing strategies.  We really enjoyed it.

Then we moved on to Betrayal at House on the Hill.  This is a quite complex but amazingly fun game.  The storyline is very Cabin in the Woods, although it precedes that movie by several years.  Basically, you build a haunted house out of tiles, thus making it different every time, and the various rooms give you items, events, and omens.  Items are usually good, events are often bad, and omens are usually a mixed blessing: it can be a valuable item for your character, but every time you get one, you have to roll for the haunting to begin.  You have to get more pips on your roll than there are omen cards on the table, so obviously there will eventually come a time when you just can’t beat it.  But of course it might come much sooner than that if you have shitty dice luck.  If you fail this roll, you look up which haunting you get by cross-referencing the room you were in with the item the omen granted you: there are 50 different scenarios in all.  Typically, one of you becomes the betrayer—it might be the one who failed the roll, or it might be someone else entirely, or it might be no one ... yet.  We played this twice, and it was entirely different the second time, which was amazing.  We’re looking forward to playing again soon.

(By the way, I have to thank The Mother, who picked out both of those games.  She doesn’t even like playing board games that much, but she knows what we like.)

So that ate up another several hours, and thus no proper post for you.  But I had a great time with all my children, so I’m not complaining, and hopefully you won’t either.  Until next week.