What I Played Today: April 19

Magestorm, Letters from Whitechapel, Portal 2

At the game store, I tried some new games after finally, finally getting my hands on a game that has been haunting my dreams for months now. But of course I wasn’t confident enough in the rules to actually put it on the table, so it will have to wait. Instead I tried out a light war game called Magestorm, which has just enough twists to make it pretty interesting. Each unit doesn’t have a known quality; it can be composed of all sorts of dudes and you wouldn’t know until you actually get up close to them. The movement is neat, in which you choose destinations instead of individual units, and the magic system is a neat idea to add some variety to the game. I didn’t understand the importance of overstacking a unit so that I could kick it in combat, and lost.

My only problem with it was that the components seemed lacking. There were only four mages included (one of which doesn’t actually cast spells, so it’s not interesting) and two armies, with only five different types of units between them. It just doesn’t feel like a good value in the box, as if they overbid on making the game look good and didn’t consider that there isn’t enough here to drive the price tag.

I also played a deduction game called Letters from Whitechapel. Now, I need to figure out by now that I’m not actually very good at deduction games, because I always think that my first assumption is correct and find it impossible to dislodge the assumption from my mind. Here again, I decided something that turned out to be the wrong thing, but it guided my actions in a way that allowed my team to win, so it worked. In this game, one person is Jack the Ripper, who is on his murder spree and acts in secret, while the rest play the cops, who is trying to track the Ripper down. They do this by moving about the board and looking for clues, i.e., where the Ripper had been that night, while the Ripper runs toward his hideout. We managed to surround the Ripper on the first night, and I got in my mind that his hideout was definitely near the center. So in the second night, I mainly concentrated around there, trying to corner the Ripper. Turns out this was the best idea, as the Ripper tried to walked right past me, and on my insistence that he was nearby, I suggested that we just start arresting everyone around a particular block. In our first hit, we caught him, and that was that.

The next level of the Portal 2 coop has been completed. This one heavily featured lightbridges, which took us a little while to figure out. There was one challenge that starts with a small room with exactly one white panel at the end of a light bridge on the floor. Where do you go, how? So confusing. My favorite was the end of the level, in which you had to bodily throw the robots at each other in order to get your objective, and once they made contact, they immediately learn the hug emote. Awesomeness.