It was around five in the morning last Tuesday when I found this bike in the middle of the road. It was an old-style bicycle that was at least as old as me -- a Huffy I believe. I took it for a spin, naturally, and rode it through the single road that leads outside of my Arctic village. Everything was completely silent and perfectly still. As I breezed through the foggy and slightly hilly tundra I caught the occasional glimpse of a caribou or hare. It was absolutely and utterly tranquil. Playing Seasons felt just like that.

Your protagonist this time around is Thomas, a nondescript white blob who jaunts about on a unicycle. While there aren't any 'puzzles' present there's always something for you to toy around with in each area. You're left without an underlying goal to obtain but you can go to the next section by pedaling to the right side of the screen. As with the majority of Vectorpark's non-games every object works under a dreamlike physics system that's a joy to play with; I wish more developers would follow their lead by bringing this level of interactivity to other titles.

It's shorter than Windowsill and Feed the Head but just as pleasant. If you're in dire need to mellow out but lost bicycles are in short supply this will more than suffice.

I have played many fanwares like the Puerto Rico Evolver and the officially licensed version of Puerto Rico and Tropic Euro is the best digital version of Puerto Rico boardgame yet. The user interface is clean and intuitive although the change in theme from a colonial Puerto Rican plantation to a WW2 factory is strange, especially because the workers were changed into gears, it is a great implementation.  Tropic Euro is excellent for beginners because if you never played a game that has variable roles and phases, Puerto Rico can be overwhelming unless someone shows you how to play--that someone can be the Tropic Euro AI.  If you are a veteran Puerto Rico player, there is something for you because, Chris Gibb implemented new buildings from the Alea Treasure Chest expansion as well as "patched" the imbalance of the Factory and University.  Andreas Seyfarth, Puerto Rico boardgame designer mentioned that he wanted to reduce the cost of University by one and raise the cost of the Factory by one.  This would make the University, an unpopular building, more attractive while reducing power of the slightly overpowered Factory.  Furthermore, the AI is tough enough to keep you coming back for one more game.  Tropic Euro is a hosted Java game that you can play online with people or with the AI.  Tropic Euro requires an account but is free to register.

Finally a Facebook game that makes you feel like you're on Kongregate! See those blood splatters in the header pic? That's monster blood, the result of killing via explosives and projectile launches. See that array of buildings? That's a non-decorative arrangement I used to express myself, with concerns for both architecture style and radius coverage of my peremeter, which has been optimized - optimized! - to cluster AI paths into areas of maximum overlap. In this game I was allowed to make decisions which affected my success relative to everyone else in a matter that was challenging. Surely italics are better than quotation marks for placing "sardonic" emphasis?

Yes, the folks at Casual Collective, makers of really neat multiplayer experiences like Buggle and featuring the maker of Kongregate breakout-hit Desktop Tower Defense, have applied their hybrid of depth and accessibility to that "space" where traditional designers have feared to tread but where angels tread quite freely: The Facebook. Now you can open that book of faces and proceed to start breaking them by spawing groups of home-brewed monsters at the door-step of other folks' tower defense arrays. If you succeed in overwhelming you can raid resources in order to grow your tower-defended base even faster. They take the chestnut of setting a timer and coming back for a reward and granulate it to a wide spectrum of time ranges, upgrade this building for 20 minutes, this one over two hours, research this monster for a day, harvest some putty in an hour and a half of the collector will be too full to continue - somehow this juggling act, in contrast to the optimal appointment that games like Farmville or Cafe World offer, appeals to the epic-compulsive drive of the active competitor or manager-type gamer. However according to their chart, people burn out on that and the resulting ratio of daily to monthly players is lower than you'd expect from a demanding strategy game.

The PvP is pretty fun as you raid someone multiple times and they start hitting back, so you reflexively get into these petty rivalries with folks you've never met - would like to see more with my actual friends, structured local leaderboards, short-term races to a goal milestone, alliances and wars and tournaments. But maybe they can roll that stuff out, at 200k DAU they're pulling prolly like 5k a day so they're probably holding onto positive operating-margins with this thing and you're going to see some new stuff roll out over time.

As far as the early game goes, I admire their boldness in not folding to the mainstays of Facebook game design. The interface is kind of a mess from a "casual" (or is that casual) point of view, but they just trust you to deal with it. Most notably, the focal mechanic of the game, attacking other players, doesn't become accessible until after a few days of active play, they even give you 14 days explicitedly when you start up. This kind of commitment, as fickel as it may seem to those who have losts years to MMORPGS, is staggering for a social game.

A note on the "indie" or indie aspect here: these guys were indie at one point, they got some investment put into them - so has practically everyone else doing games on Facebook with a significant level of success - does that make them less indie? According to my definition, only if they brought an MBA on staff.

But hey man, at least we have a game where you can post a newsfeed that isn't totally hokey, and maybe even inspire some badass admiration as you start unlocking that hardcore, high-level monster and warn your friends. I Like that.

It just so happens that I'm in Buckland, Alaska for the weekend; I'm doing some contract work for the Kotzebue, AK school. Wiki it, the village has like four hundred people and three dirt roads to it's name. My plane touched ground not two hours ago. I stretched my legs and took a couple of students with me to the sole, cabin-size store in the area. I perused their wares and gawked at their eight dollar Oreo packs and ten buck boxes of Wheaties. After I got my sticker-shock giggles out of my system I turned for the exit. I walked past their counter and found...

three unopened Ocarina of Time boxes. It was the most surreal shit that's happened to me in quite some time. For a minute or so I just stared at the dusty containers -- I felt like I was eight all over again. They were selling for 110 clams** but I bartered with the manager, like some old time miner haggling over some salted pork and hardtack I struck a deal. I got the trio for 150 bucks. How sick is that? If I hit up eBay I can sell one for exactly that, gift one to my little bro as a keepsake (it's his favorite game), and have one to sell for crack when I eventually become destitute. Kidding. I'll probably just end up doing meth.

I also picked up the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil for twenty dollars, natch.

**I bought, or rather, my parents bought Banjo Kazooie in my hometown for $90 back in the day

This is a game about a redneck. A game about swatting mosquitoes, chugging beers, and taking shits. This game is also about dreams. A bird flutters over a lake of fire, but if she flies too high she gets scalded by the sun. Norrland is a game about the mundane interspersed with the surreal, and ultimately concerns itself with a life not worth living. Norrland is my favorite Cactus game.

Real Estate Empire 2, (REE2) is a serious real estate investment sim that is marketed as a casual tycoon type of game. I love games that are both accurate simulations and fun because then you are tricked into learning, a most clever ploy. When Greg Costikyan did a review of Real E$tate Empire, I immediately bought a copy, because I am a fan of serious investment games. I liked Real E$tate Empire but, it was unnecessary complex in areas like the house repairs options but lacked the basics like the ability to rent. I am glad to see that these short comings were shored up in REE2.

REE2 has four historical scenarios including the recent Southern California real estate market crash. You begin enough money to buy one house (or a trailer), then make improvements to increase the home value, meanwhile finding renters to cover your mortgage. Keeping cash flow steady is tricky because renters tend to move out at inconvenient times. The game seemed impossible at first because I can never get ahead due to the constant renter turnover. It was so difficult that I thought the game was broken and even contacted the developer, Lennard Feddersen, about how the renters work. Then I remembered something I read in real estate investment book, Timing the Real Estate Market : How to Buy Low and Sell High in Real Estate by Craig Hall. Hall emphasized that in the real estate market, money is made from selling homes not from collecting rent. I took Hall's advice and developed a new strategy--focus on improving homes for resale rather than focusing on juggling tenants. REE2, being an accurate simulation, the new strategy payed off. I bought, fixed, and sold my property and had enough money to buy two new homes and was on the path of being a real estate tycoon.

Although REE2 is accurate simulation, it is targeting to the casual game market and thus there are no details like a credit system, variable interest rates, charts or market indicators which makes it difficult to gauge what direction the markets are heading. However I realize that in order to make a game easy as Diner Dash, some details must be ignored. REE2 is a casual, almost cartoon looking like game that has slightly more complexity than Diner Dash but will make you a more informed investor. Since I can count in one hand, games that teach personal finance and is also fun, I definitely recommend that everyone give REE2 a try. If you ever wanted to learn more about real estate investing but was afraid or seemed too complicated, begin your journey with REE2.

Strategy tip: negotiate to buy for less than asking price and sell for more than bidding price.

No Thanks! is the one of the most elegant, minimalistic tabletop game every made. On your turn you face a penalty point card and have two choices: yes or no thanks. That is it...the whole game is summed up as twenty-one yes or no choices. You think that with such simple binary choices, it could be repetitive but on the contrarily, it the one most tense 15 minutes one will experience. Few designers can pack that much tension, in such a short time, with the shortest rules.

No Thanks! is a tabletop card game that comes a small box with a deck of cards printed with large numbers ranging from 3-33 and 55 mini poker chips. The game is setup by randomly discarding nine cards from the shuffled deck, face-down to prevent card counting and each player receives 11 point chips. The game begins as the first player flips one card up and gets a choice or yes or no of taking the card that was flipped up. If a player says "no thanks," then the that player pays a chip on top of the card and the next player has the same choice of yes or no, but the difference is that is current player says yes, she takes the penalty card AND the all the chips that was paid to say "no" on top of the card. Since the game is a closed economy, no new chips enter or leave the game, thus only way to get more point chips is to buy taking penalty cards with the chips. At the end of the game you count all the penalty points and subtract that from the number point chips. Because there are high number penalty cards like 33, it is common for most player to get a double digit negative score. In a good auction game (No Thanks! is an auction to avoid penalty), there should be no optimal value and desires for in-game elements should be asymmetrical between players lest through repeated play, the optimal price will be figured, and in the process turn a tense risk taking game into a pedestrian memory exercise. The asymmetry of desire is achieved via a rule that consecutive penalty points numbers merge rather than sum up. If you acquire the 10 penalty point card and you already the the 11 penalty point card, the penalty points don't add up to 21, rather the 10 covers up the 11 and your penalty points become a total of 10. This is especially important when one penalty card connects two other penalty cards. Say you have 10 and 12 penalty point cards that adds up to 22 penalty points, however if you acquire the 11 penalty point card, then 10-11-12 merge and your total reduces to a 10 penalty points.

Here is what goes in my mind in the middle of a sample game: I am in the lead because I have no penalty points cards but because I kept saying "no thanks", I have only six points chips left. Six chips buy me only six more no's and if cannot say no, I might be forced to face a high penalty card, like a 33. It is my turn and I see five chips on the 24 penalty card--looks tempting but taking 24 penalty points is a great penalty for only five chips, but I am running low on chips and I have to take a penalty card sooner or later. Do I play it safe and take the 24 penalty points and the much needed five point chips or do I say "no thanks" and hope that other will also say "no thanks" and pass the 24 penalty card to me with even more chips for me to take.

There is a digital port, a clone of the No Thanks!, called Tricky Squirrel by Harald Gruber.

PS: I recommend playing with the official tactical variant, which says discard nine cards like normally but three cards are known, the 10-20-30 (as shown in screenshot of Tricky Squirrel). The variant ensures that someone cannot get aggressive and lucky and connect something like fifteen penalty cards together and win.

Alastair John Jack clearly loves the 8-bit era. His earlier titles -- including the Castlevania/Final Fantasy munge Final Vision -- are heavily indebted to the late 80s model of arcade-ish game design. Arvoesine is also unapologetically old school: you're granted a single, solitary life sans extra credit or continue for the duration of the game. Pattern recognition rules with a pixelated iron fist; you either adapt to the game's system or perish trying. If minimalistic masochism is your fetish of choice Al Jack has you covered.

You play as a roman legionnaire pitted against a slew of anachronistic enemies; you're bopping ancient Egyptians in the second level and impaling vikings in the next. The aesthetics ooze nostalgia -- the chunky pixels are downright cute and the soundtrack by Pgil is oustanding (OST, pretty please?). The mono-black background totally fits too.

The game's all about combat, and combat's all about positioning. Imagine the offspring of a Ghost & Goblins, Castlevania**, and Ninja Gaiden three-way and you'd hit the mark. Platforming, except for a scant few sections, is secondary to smashing dudes in the face. Arvoesine's definitely hard, but it's a lot fairer than its forefathers. Instead of the dreaded bottomless pit you have the more forgiving spiked variety, and while the enemy patterns are fiendish they aren't exploitative or annoying. The item economy is whittled down to a solitary carrot per level, and if you're crazy enough you can toggle that off as well. Mastering your infinite supply of javelins is crucial; your spears' low parabolic trajectory requires you to take advantage of both your enemies' height and your own. These javelins are also the key to the boss battles, which are pretty cool.

The game lasts a concise five levels, a buck per stage, if you want to leverage a complaint against it you could off-handedly call it "too short." For an hour or two minimum of tight gameplay, though, this isn't a bad deal. If you want to obtain a high score you'll have to be a polyrhythmic math-rock savant to pull off the timing necessary for the score multiplier. If perfectionist masochism is your thing you'll squeeze even more out of it.

While I was en route to the sole convenience store in this arctic wasteland I realized this: the game's cheaper than a pack of smokes, and unlike cigarettes it leaves you satisfied when you finish it. Take that for what you will.

**Those vikings totally throw axes like a Belmont.

I'm going to start this review off with a comic that I think sums up the male existential dilemma more succinctly than anything I've ever seen, and then link you to the author's explanation of the game. Then I'm going to say, hey! Don't read that stuff yet! Play the game first! Some fraction of you may have follow the links sequentially and are now feeling cheated. Hey, at least you aren't stuck in a dead-end relationship!

The game follows the abstract geometry of Rod Humble's The Marriage. That game had a no-click interface based on parsing the cursor over different shapes to try and make the pink and blue squares (representing the archetypical male and female since 1956) come together and kiss while also gaining self-esteem from circles representing various nourishments of life such as career. The women gained her esteem from the relationship and the man from the world, so it was.

This time around you've got two children involved (little pink and/or blue circles, randomly assigned), separated from you by a barrier created by the divorce, you can get the kids to come over using a roughly parsed gestural interface, and the clicking to intervene takes a role with the same circles representing general nourishment. As far as I can interpret it, the game is about the wreckage of the pain of a former "true love" not only being distant, but being at once a necessity to the emotional lives of your children and also a subversive enemy, keeping them from you, warping them in ways you do not approve. So you're left with the task of manning up, seeing through your emotions, past that wall, and intervening to try and do the best for your children. In this case, that means keeping them from bumping into the mother too much and making sure they get education or baseball or piano lessons or whatever those circles are so they can grow instead of shrink in her infantilizing aura of matrilineal egotism. On the other hand, if you "round them up" and bring them over to your side, surely as the result of painful litigation, it costs them, so it's not so one sided in male bias.

There's also a dynamic with color fading and gravity, which is kind of interesting, and you can infer your own nuances from that or read the author's statements.

First my personal impression and then the more mechanical critique. I had sort of a lite version of a divorce last year at the age of 23 with a pregnant girlfriend, she has since given birth, threatened me with not being able to see the kid multiple times when she was in a bad mood, basically prevented me from having any direct role in raising him, and exploited me economically while denying my due visitations. But it's all good because he's a beautiful, healthy boy and any amount of visitation is better than none right? We've also chilled out and are on functional if not friendly terms. It's probably better that we didn't get married because it probably would have taken a lot longer to arrive at this relatively zero-sum situation, which surely could be disrupted to my disadvantage if any economic or emotional meteors happen to fall out of the sky. So I can relate to this shit, and my interpretations of the mechanics was undoubtedly biased by my experience, yours may be quite different.

Mechanically I think the game is more problematic as an interpretive system because of the added complexity in interface. Because the input verb of The Marriage was singular, mouse over something, and the resulting mechanics were all context-sensitive, you could explore the screen with your cursor having no preface and construct your own context through experimentation, which interestingly enough is kind of how most marriages actually work (or don't). This game is dealing with a dimensionally more complex manifestation of human relationships and tries to deal with it by adding not one degree of control but several, including one that depends on parsing gestures, which are an extremely problematic form of interface design as I hope many of us learned in the past years with the whole Wii hubbub. As a result players are more or less dependent on the author's explanation to be able to explore the system, thus pre-empting the journey of self-discovery and making the game, if you can imagine this, less accessible than Rod Humble's piece. But maybe that's ok, maybe this kind of biographical game has its place in complement to games exploring a concept from the second person. When Jason Rohrer did it people confused the sprite of his son for a little girl, this time around the little circles will be less mistakable.