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My kid brother Jens turned 26 on saturday. Congratulations, and stuff! I guess neither one of us is the party-party type, as there was no real birthday shin-dig. “…but come on over, there's always coffee“, I was told. That is common courtesy when living out in the woods. (even though Jens does live in the “town” center). Well, I didn't need to be invited twice. When Jens offers “coffee” and his fiancé Linda adds in “food” and “pie”, one clears the schedule. We ended up adding “boardgames”, “computer games” and “wine” to the mix.

Hot Lava Death!
With hot coffee in one hand we all played a game of The Downfall of Pompeii. It was a first for me, and I ended up liking the game very much. The game plays in two phases. In the first you play cards to add people into buildings in the city of Pompeii. If you add people into a building where there already are people, you get to add further “relatives”.

In the second phase (triggered by drawing a specific card) the volcano Vesuvius erupts, and you're in a hurry to get your people out of the city safe and sound. From this point on, instead of playing cards you draw Lava-tiles and place them on the board. The Lava spreads and naturally burns everything and everyone in its' path. In addition you get to move two people per turn, trying to get them out the city gates. The people move as many squares as there were people in the square in which they began their turn, themselves included. Whoever gets more people out is the winner, the tie-breaker being who got less people thrown into the volcano.

This causes interesting gameplay. You need to get a lot of people in to be able to get a lot of people out. You need to spread them out as much as possible, so that a single Lava-tile doesn't kill all of your people at once, but still keep them close enough to the gates. And even though you don't want to give good spaces to your opponents, you actually want opponents in the same houses as you, because that means they don't want to see that house burn either.

It's a very fun game even though it's vicious. It was a very tight race, Linda got more people into the city, but lost more to the lavaflow. In the end, I won the game with 13 people out, Jens following with 12 and Linda managing 10.

Hokus-bogus
Linda sat down with a book so we took it upon ourselves to get a 2-player game going. I thought Shazamm! had a shiny box (hey, it's as good an excuse as anything else!) and Jens immediately said “okey“. Again, it's a new acquaintance for me. In Shazamm! you play mighty wizards about to cross a bridge. However, the bridge is only wide enough to pass one person, and neither wizard wants to back off. To top it off, there's a fire in between, and the bridge is crumbling from both edges. Yeah, don't even try to find any logic there…

For every round you have 50 points of Mana (magic power) to use. You also have a deck of spells (identical to both wizards which you can use. Both players secretly choose how many points of Mana they want to use, as well as which, if any spells you want to cast right now. The spells are gone once you've used them, and you only have a few of them to use (the initial hand is five cards) Then both players reveal how many points they've used, as well as which spells they will cast. The amount of Mana they've committed is their attacking strength.

The spells are then dealt with in numerical order. The spells do anything from canceling out opponent spells, to raising your Mana, to increasing their attack strength, etc. Whoever has the higher attack strength once all spells are cast wins the turn and the fire moves one step closer to the loser. Then you do another round. Remember that you only have a total of 50 points of Mana to use for the entire round. You play rounds until either player runs out of Mana, the fire reaches either player or any spell states that the round is over. At that point Mana points are reset, and both wizards are moved to three steps from the fire. In addition the first step of the bridge on both ends crumble to dust. And then you keep playing until either wizard falls off the bridge, leaving the other… well… trapped on a burning bridge that leads to no-where.

…which is kind of how I felt about this game… It's got all the things I generally hate. It's second-guessing, blind-bidding and cards that break the game. I don't hate all cards, some spells are really good. There's one spell that lets you adjust your attack strength up or down by five points, for example. With that, you can add to it if you'll be able to win the bout, or lower it if it's lost anyway – so you'll have more Mana to spare. But there are worse spells. There's one which reverses the result of the bout. So the one with the lower attack-strength wins. So you commit one point of Mana, play this spell – win the bout and lose only a single point of Mana as well… This is so much stronger than all other cards that it almost breaks the game alone. I really, really, really hated the game. Jens won it, but I consider myself a victor because the game ended.

Zombies on Steam
At this point Jens and I hooked up our laptops and went for some LAN-gaming. A few races of TOCA Race Driver 3 and a few races of 1nsane, both of which we've bought from GOG.com (Good Old Games). We are both fans of the company, who sell a bit older games as downloads. We don't have high-end gaming PC:s, so these older games are often the only ones we can play, and these are games which can be difficult to find in the shops.

What GOG do so brilliantly with the games they sell are two of their main selling points… I've written about it before, but I'll mention them again. All games are tested to work both on XP and Vista, and all and any DRM (copy protection) is removed. But we've bought all the games from GOG we want right now, so we looked at Steam, which I've heard a lot about lately. They sell a lot of newer games as well – games which our computers just can't manage, but we found one in particular which we both bought, downloaded, installed and played whole-heartedly.

Steam works a bit differently, and I'm not too fond of some of their mechanics. You download the game to your local computer, and you can download it again if you switch computers etc. But every time you want to play the game, you have to be logged in to Steam. So you probably can't play it without an internet-connection, I guess… And what happens when/if Steam goes out of business? Are all my bought games non-useable!? Well, although I prefer what the boys at GOG do, the game we bought was fantastic. Being logged into Steam has it's advantages too, as it becomes a social site – where you can have friends, and you see what games these friends have and what they are playing. (Btw. I'm themosse (Mosse) on the Steam-community)

We bought the co-op horror first-person shooter Killing Floor. Although we generally prefer the thinking man's tactical shooters, like Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon or SWAT 4 – this is nothing like it, but very fun. Hordes of Zombies are attacking you – and you'll just have to survive waves of hungry undead. Between waves you run like crazy to the “Trader” to bulk up on new weapons, ammunition, armor and first aid syringes.

There's very few tactical choices to be made here. Mainly choosing where to make your stand, welding up doors (a temporary solution to keeping out zombies…) and maybe deciding one player should have a fire-arm whilst the other sports a melee weapon, like the handy chainsaw for example. So why do I like this even though I usually prefer more clever and tactical shooters? It's all about the atmosphere, baby! This is like being in a zombie-movie…

Problem is, my PC-laptop is getting older, and there has long been a problem which I think is the graphics card, meaning although my machine exceeds the minimum requirements, and I draw back on the graphics detail etc., it still crashes every now and again… Maybe time for a new gaming laptop? A birthday present, from Mosse to Mosse? Happy birthday, Mosse? (although I would really want to wait until Windows 7 is released before I buy a new Win-PC – don't want that crappy, crappy Vista…)

So happy birthday, Jens – it was fun killing Zombies with you.
More fun than strawberry cake and juice.