Merchants and Marauders, (disclosed)
At the game store tonight, I sat in on a game of Merchants and Marauders, which I heard some praise for. It’s a simple “get this number of victory points” game in which you sail around the Caribbean and try to either make your way through commerce, or make your way through villainy. It’s very crunchy and very American, with dice rolls and lots of cards, and it just looks like fun.
Being a gentleman, I decided commerce was the way to go, and so I quickly discerned how to get points quickly and started, buying goods cheap, sailing to an adjacent location, selling the goods, scoring the points. I took advantage of the various quests to get more points and some illfound goods, and upgraded my ship to a huge galleon, and was running into the lead. Unfortunately, this also gained the attention of my opponents, who said, “Oh screw this, I’m attacking that guy.” So the player to my left, who had managed to take over a bigger ship by virtue of really good rolls, attacks my ship, and because my character wasn’t good at anything except treasure hunting, I get boarded, killed, and he takes ALL of my stuff. Literally everything I had worked for; money, goods, my ship, all of my cards. That’s just terrible, and the fact that I got killed again next turn just made me throw up my hands and say “screw this! I’m going home!” Interesting game, but when playing with an aggressive player, it’s a bit hard, and the penalty for losing a battle is really rough.
Also got into a beta for a game I’ve been looking forward too. It’s in pretty elementary shape, with a lot of stuff missing and a lot of bugs. And the main game is about as bland as they get. BUT! The part I care about is fully supported and as fun as I remember, although it will take a while for me to build up to the level I want to see it. Also, it’s playable in the browser with Unity, so right on there.
SIDE NOTE: I keep fighting against the Unity gaming engine. I have no idea why, it’s just a gaming engine, something that is easy to build a game in. I guess I associate it with the memory hog gaming software Shockwave and others. But the fact that it doesn’t even do the same thing as those other programs, I don’t even know what’s with the animosity. Maybe because Kongregate is currently running a contest asking developers to specifically use this program, maybe because I played a couple of crap iOS games that used Unity…Yeah, I don’t even know what’s the beef. Anyway, I will put it all behind me, because when Unity allows me to run a full 3D game smoothly and quickly in a browser window? Ten points sir.
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