Lords of Discord - come and gone

The last new app of the week was Lords of Discord.  Again, this was turn-based, but this time the style was orthogonal and the combatants stand in specific spots and do their thing.  The initiative is show by sorting the icons at the top of the screen and as each guy's turn comes up, you can attack, defend, or wait.  Some guys have special abilities.  The usual stuff.

There was a castle screen, of course, but after the first visit, it was almost always covered up by a big frame trying to get me to go to the arena or whatever.  I was able to train two new troops, but I only had one slot open in my party.  There is a reasonable range of character types and art to choose from, but it just feels like something is missing.  I should be able to take more PCs out to explore, but I guess everything is perfectly balanced to the expected party strength.  I don't know.


It would add a lot if you could move a PC to a different space during battle.  The first time I put a new guy into the back row, he ha no ranged weapons or spells, and did nothing the entire time.

After about 15 minutes, ads started coming up.  Too many ads, wasting my time over and over again.  I'm not sure I will continue with this one either.

The standardization and reward-clicking of all these games makes me want to take some of my old solo D&D guys (1st edition) and one of the zillions of free dungeons or scenarios and throw some dice for a while.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more