Trading

To continue a theme, my fondness for German board games is no secret. I’m hardly a Germanophile; it's just that the most complex, thoughtful, and engaging tabletop games seem to come out of that country. For the most part, they lend themselves to social gatherings, including family groups, are generally well researched, have far more substance than games like Trivial Pursuit or Taboo, and yet do not require the same commitment of time, study and focus of a game like Go. Ra, Modern Art, and Puerto Rico, the subject of this review, are among my favorites.

Like a well-written book, each playing of Puerto Rico reveals further complexities. A trading game set in colonial Puerto Rico, when ships had sails, the game tasks you, the player, with sending goods back to Spain. While there are several different mechanisms that become more or less important as the game progresses, there is really one way to win: amass the most victory points, something that's important to remember -- during a recent game, one of my fellow players adhered to what seemed like a foolish strategy, seeking out quantities of a commodity with no cash value, but won the game, having earned the most points by sending the most goods back to the Old World.

Take an Elite-style game like Flatspace II. Set it in a cartoony universe where Zombies and Ninjas are waging an interstellar war. Tool around in a "starship" that's more like a Buick with a stardrive and lasers. Wage space battles against, among other things, space-going galleons and pterodactyls, and trade goods like cheese, paper, and kittens--no "industrial goods" or other boring stuff here. All to a loud, frenetic neopunk score--that's Ninjastarmageddon!.

Starscape is a great example how a small team that knows what its doing can pack a lot of gameplay into a small package--and Moonpod, a team of long-term industry vets turned indie, know precisely what they're doing.

At its heart, Starscape is a space "shmup" (shoot-em-up) with the kind of fast, intense shooting action you expect in a game of that style; but layered atop that is a game of resource management and tech development.

Smugglers 3 hearkens back to an earlier generation of 4X space exploration and conquest games. In a way, it's the sort of game I might have played on my old Apple II--but of course much prettier graphics.

You're a starship captain during an interstellar civil war, belonging to one of four factions in the war. Your primary activities involve trading (including smuggling illegal goods, if you so choose); accepting combat missions in support of your faction; or becoming a pirate and attacking planets. As usual in games like this, you start off with a tiny ship, and progress is mainly in the form of earning enough money and rising in rank so that you can get bigger and better ships.

You could almost call Orbital Trader a casual game for geeks. It's a space trading game--you start with a small starship, move from one planet to another buying and selling stuff. You're limited to a single star system (no FTL here), and planets move over time, and you're restricted to transfer orbits, so closer planets are a lot easier to get to. Each planet has only a single commodity, and it's easy to find destinations where you can make a profit (mouseover your planet, and you'll see what its commodity fetches everywhere else in the system). And that's--really about all there is to it.